this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Source of this is from Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare posted at 11:34 Jul 9,2023. It was posted to his twitter (@eastdakota). Not linking to twitter bc don't want a deadlink next time twitter makes API changes. And not to drive traffic to twitter :D

Edit: July 11th update, arstechnica published a detailed explanation

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/

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[–] varsock 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I dont know to what capacity twitter uses cloudflare but cloudflare is rather ubiquitous. Even if twitter didn't have services with cloudflare, when a user's device resolves the domain name "twitter.com" to an IP address, it might go through Cloudflare's DNS servers. And givien the ubiquity of Cloudflare DNS, this is likely frequently. By monitoring the DNS queries for Twitter.com, Cloudflare can estimate the traffic volume by analyzing the number and frequency of requests received.

I don't know why cloudflare's CEO would do that or where he keeps his huge steel balls, but today I learned I can mine Cloudflare's internet usage data. And I might have found a new hobby!

Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..

Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.