“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.”
Freenom’s free .tk, .cf and .gq domains made up 23.1% of everything Cloudflare hosted. Netcraft’s top million sites included only 59 on .tk. Malicious URLs on those TLDs fell 86.9% since December. A big slice of Cloudflare’s domain count was free throwaway names for phishing, and Freenom pulled the plug days before announcing its exit.