Case Study: ProPublica ensures uptime during traffic surges and cuts TTFB 50% with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare ensures that ProPublica’s site scales and remains available and performant during sudden traffic surges

ProPublica, an independent nonprofit newsroom focused on investigative reporting, worked with agency partner Happy Cog to modernize its site and CMS. While the new system improved editorial workflows, it produced more complex pages that made the site vulnerable to sudden, high-visibility traffic spikes and cache stampedes that could crash origin servers and require costly additional front-end capacity.

Together they built the “Baconator,” a reverse-proxy caching layer on Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV that stores HTML at the edge, serves cached pages to readers, and uses queued background refreshes to update content. The edge-first approach keeps user traffic off origin servers, halving time-to-first-byte and cutting required origin capacity by about 40%, while ensuring the site remains available even if origin servers go down.

ProPublica

Frank Sharpe

Senior Product Developer