By now, the whole world knows about Cloudbleed, so no need to regurgitate the known. However, lets read between the lines. First, it’s not all bad news. The leak of “encryption keys, cookies, passwords, chunks of post data and even HTTPs request” is tragic, but the name of CloudFlare is now top of mind and tip of tongue within the global tech community.
And as far as global branding is concerned, its better to be top of mind and tip of tongue in anything in the global conversation than it is to be a next-gen startup in something with killer features that no one knows about. Second, this incident happened while Matthew Prince is in Greece – there is nothing worse then being awoken from your slumber by a 911 call while on the Greek isles. Third, we now know that Uber, Fitbit and OKCupid are using CloudFlare, all which are Alex <2,000 accounts – that’s impressive. Fourth, Fortune called CloudFlare a “multi-billion” startup, which is an interesting valuation, but we’ll go along with it. Key takeaway – this is not the first nor the last of an “xxxbleed” will see this year.