Our approach to abuse

Cloudflare Registrar offers secure domain name registration and management services. Concerns about particular content on a website are generally not properly addressed by domain name registrars, which can only take action as to entire domains.

Registrars are better positioned to address concerns tied to the domain name, such as reports regarding inaccurate WHOIS information or domain hijacking (when the registration of a domain name is changed without the permission of the original registrant). Cloudflare takes reasonable steps through our registrar-abuse process to investigate and act on reports of such abuse submitted through our abuse page. Concerns that a particular domain name violates a trademark should be directed to the domain name registrant using the WHOIS lookup process.

Cloudflare cannot remove from the Internet content that it does not host, and the vast majority of abuse reports we receive relate to our non-hosting reverse proxy, pass-through security, and CDN services. While we cannot remove from the Internet the content identified in those reports, we will forward your report to the hosting provider and website operator who can. In the much rarer instance that an abuse report relates to content hosted by Cloudflare through Cloudflare Stream, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Workers KV, or Cloudflare Images, we may remove or block access to content that we identify as violating our supplemental terms for those products.

As with the rest of our abuse system, Cloudflare’s approach to terminating services depends on the nature of the service at issue. Because Cloudflare’s security services help prevent cyberattack from being used as a means for network disruption, terminating all our services is not normally an appropriate or effective response to abuse. We may suspend or terminate hosting services, however, if we conclude that those services have been repeatedly used to store content in violation of our policy and that no meaningful steps have been taken to address the issue. Other services will only be terminated in narrowly defined circumstances, consistent with our Human Rights Policy, where we conclude that termination is required by laws that are precise, transparent, and legitimate under human rights law, or voluntary termination is consistent with established limitations to freedom of expression under international human rights, such as protecting the rights of others, and termination is an appropriate and proportional way to address the concern. Consistent with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512), Cloudflare has adopted and implemented a policy for the termination of services to repeat copyright infringers. Cloudflare strives to be transparent about its approach to abuse, and we report on when we have terminated services to websites, including for websites containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), in our Transparency Report.