Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

Friday, March 15, 2024 2:20 PM

A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduction in the number of websites hosted by Cloudflare.

The disappearance of these websites was spotted during our monthly Web Server Survey and represents a 98.7% drop from the number of Freenom domains that were resolvable last month.

Nearly all .tk, .cf and .gq domains have effectively disappeared.

The .tk, .cf and .gq TLDs are country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) for Tokelau, Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea. They were officially intended to be used by entities connected with these countries, but this was very rarely the case.

The huge drop is likely the culmination of a series of events that started last year, when Freenom was sued by Meta for ignoring abuse complaints. Freenom subsequently paused new domain registrations in March 2023, and Netcraft noticed a dramatic reduction in the amount of cybercrime across two TLDs that later moved away from the provider (.ga and .ml).

Finally, on 12 February 2024, Freenom announced that it had decided to exit the domain name business, including the operation of registries. The same press release (which has since been removed but is archived here) also announced that Freenom had resolved the Meta lawsuit on confidential monetary and business terms.

Cloudflare losses

The affected domains represent a big loss for Cloudflare, with .tk, .cf and .gq previously accounting for 23.1% of all domains hosted on its platform – and nearly all of these have now gone.

The combined amount of .tk, .cf and .gq domains hosted by Cloudflare has fallen by 99.8% since our March 2024 Web Server Survey, leading to a noticeable 22.0% ...

 

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