2026 Birthday Week: Network Performance Update

Hi everyone, it's Shii-chan! This is the Birthday Week network performance report. How the numbers are measured matters too, so we'll look at that.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog reported its 2026 network performance update. Cloudflare is now the fastest provider across 74% of the top 1,000 global networks (as of August 2026).

Why it matters

Network speed directly affects user experience. Cloudflare expanded its real-user measurement scale while keeping user privacy.

What changes

Compared with last time:

• Share of networks where Cloudflare is fastest: from 60% (April 2026) to 74%, a 14 percentage point gain across 150 additional networks
• Geographic reach: 38 additional countries where Cloudflare ranks fastest

Dive Deep

How it's measured:

• Primary metric: connection time, measured as TCP handshake completion, using the trimean (a weighted average of the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles)
• Data source 1: Cloudflare-branded error pages (since 2021)
• Data source 2: Challenge Pages, newly added, which run small, non-interactive measurements in the background while visitors see security verification screens

The system fetches lightweight files from several providers, including Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Google, Fastly, and Akamai, and records completion times under users' actual network conditions. Challenge Pages use Cloudflare Turnstile technology, so data is collected during everyday interactions without extra user action, while maintaining privacy.

The post also notes that gaps between top providers are sometimes only 1-2 milliseconds, which makes rankings sensitive to outliers until data volume increases.

Wrap-up

• Fastest across 74% of the top 1,000 networks (60% in April)
• The metric is the trimean of TCP handshake connection time
• Challenge Pages measurements expand scale while keeping privacy

A nice read if you want to learn how CDN performance comparisons are made!