Cloudflare’s fifth annual Impact Report, announced December 19, 2025, describes free cybersecurity and performance services for election offices, independent media, journalists, human-rights defenders, humanitarian groups, and other civil-society organizations. Its headline figures are substantial, but they are program metrics reported by Cloudflare—not independent measurements of election outcomes or proof that any one attack was prevented.
What the 2025 report covers
The report groups Cloudflare’s public-interest work into two principal programs and related tools:
- Project Galileo supports at-risk public-interest organizations, including journalists, human-rights defenders, and humanitarian organizations.
- The Athenian Project provides free security and performance services for state and local election websites in the United States.
- Bot Management and AI Crawl Control are being incorporated into free Galileo services so participating media and nonprofit sites can manage automated and AI-service access to their content.
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince summarized the company’s stated motivation in the announcement: “Our mission—to help build a better Internet—is the driving force behind everything we do.”
Project Galileo: protecting civil-society organizations
Project Galileo is Cloudflare’s program for organizations whose work serves the public interest but that may be exposed to censorship, harassment, or cyberattack. Cloudflare’s current Impact page lists more than 3,000 Internet properties in more than 120 countries and 57 civil-society partners. Those are Cloudflare’s program totals, not an independent census of all eligible organizations.
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Threat volume in the Radar reporting window
Cloudflare’s Radar Data Insights Team reported blocking 108.9 billion cyber threats against organizations protected by Project Galileo from May 1, 2024, through March 31, 2025. Over that same 11-month period, Cloudflare calculated an average of nearly 325.2 million attacks per day. The daily figure is an average for that specific window, not a forecast or a count for every year.
Additional 2025 figures in the announcement
The December 2025 announcement separately said Galileo participants faced an average of 9.9 billion cyberattacks per month and cited an average of 290 million attacks per day against independent news organizations in 2025. These figures describe different populations or reporting bases from the May 2024–March 2025 Radar statistics, so they should not be added together or treated as a single time series.
The Athenian Project: election-website protection
The Athenian Project is aimed at state and local election websites rather than the broader global civil-society population served by Galileo. Cloudflare says participating sites receive free security and performance services.
2025 program reach
On the current Impact page, Cloudflare lists 441 or more protected Internet properties and 33 U.S. states receiving free Athenian Project services in 2025. “Internet properties” can include more than one site or service associated with an election organization, so the property count is not the same as a count of election offices or jurisdictions.
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U.S. election-site DDoS attacks in 2024
Cloudflare reports that it blocked 200 million DDoS attacks against U.S. state and local government election sites between September and November 2024. This is a U.S.-specific, three-month figure; it is not a worldwide total and does not represent all of 2025.
How the programs differ
| Program or measure | Who or what it covers | Reported figure | Period or qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Galileo reach | At-risk public-interest organizations | 3,000+ Internet properties; 120+ countries; 57 civil-society partners | Cloudflare’s current Impact page, accessed September 27, 2026 |
| Galileo threats blocked | Organizations protected by Project Galileo | 108.9 billion threats; nearly 325.2 million per day | May 1, 2024–March 31, 2025; Cloudflare Radar Data Insights Team |
| Athenian Project reach | State and local U.S. election websites | 441+ Internet properties; 33 states | 2025; Cloudflare’s current Impact page, accessed September 27, 2026 |
| Athenian DDoS activity | U.S. state and local government election sites | 200 million DDoS attacks blocked | September–November 2024 |
| Galileo announcement metric | Galileo participants | 9.9 billion attacks per month on average | As stated in Cloudflare’s December 19, 2025 announcement; separate from the Radar window |
| Independent-news metric | Independent news organizations | 290 million attacks per day on average | 2025, as stated in the December 19, 2025 announcement |
AI crawler controls for news and nonprofit sites
Cloudflare says free Galileo services now incorporate Bot Management and AI Crawl Control. The purpose is to give participating independent news and nonprofit sites more control over whether AI services can access, crawl, or reuse their content. Cloudflare also committed to training news outlets on AI tools.
These controls address a practical problem for small publishers: automated traffic can consume resources, while unrestricted crawling can make it difficult to express a site’s preferences about AI-related access. The announcement describes the tools and training commitment; it does not establish that every Galileo organization receives identical configurations or that blocking crawlers guarantees a particular licensing, attribution, or model-training outcome.
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Threats blocked are not election results
The reported attack totals measure activity handled by Cloudflare’s systems. They do not show whether an election was disrupted, whether a journalist was physically safe, or whether a nonprofit achieved a program goal. A blocked request can also represent repeated automated traffic from a campaign rather than a successful intrusion.
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Keep the windows and populations separate
The 200 million DDoS figure concerns U.S. election sites in September–November 2024. The 108.9 billion and 325.2 million figures concern Galileo-protected organizations worldwide over May 1, 2024–March 31, 2025. The 2025 reach figures count properties and states, while the announcement’s 9.9 billion and 290 million figures use separate averages. Mixing these measures would create a misleading comparison.
What the report does establish
- Cloudflare has made free protection available through established programs for specified public-interest groups and election websites.
- The programs operated at large reported scale across countries, properties, states, and attack events.
- Cloudflare is extending traffic-management and AI-crawler controls to help smaller media and nonprofit organizations set access policies.
Why this matters to election offices, journalists, and nonprofits
For election administrators, the Athenian Project is focused on keeping public information sites reachable during periods when DDoS traffic can overwhelm ordinary hosting. For independent publishers and civil-society groups, Galileo combines edge security and performance services with a model intended for organizations that may lack large security teams or budgets. AI Crawl Control adds a newer governance question—who may retrieve a site’s content and under what conditions—to the older availability and abuse-prevention problem.
The strongest, defensible conclusion is therefore about capacity and exposure: Cloudflare reports that these programs are protecting a sizable and heavily targeted set of public-interest Internet properties. The figures alone cannot prove causation, compare Cloudflare with another provider, or measure the broader health of elections, journalism, or nonprofit work.
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