The potential of quantum to transform the industry is enormous – with change already here.
One day in March this year, Cloudflare engineers pushed an update that instantly wrapped more than a third of the company’s global traffic – around one-fifth of the world’s websites – in quantum-resistant encryption.
The company’s chief technology officer said that the change had been enacted on the basis of customer demand. He compared the changeover to the Y2K scramble – but without a known deadline.
But there is a deadline – of sorts. Last November, NIST published draft guidance that deprecates RSA, ECC, and other legacy algorithms by 2030 and bans them outright after 2035, giving every agency, cloud platform, and certificate authority just ten years to finish the cryptographic makeover. It’s an attempt to bring cybersecurity online bang up to date.
Browsers and servers are already shifting.
Starting in August 2023, Google Chrome began turning on a hybrid X25519 + Kyber handshake by default, used for establishing symmetric secrets in TLS (Transport Layer Security) connections, aiming to protect against both current and future threats, including those posed by potential quantum computers Cloudflare followed by making the same algorithm generally available across its edge and origin connections.
Together, those two changes mean a growing slice of everyday HTTPS sessions are now “quantum-safe” end-to-end, often without users noticing a thing.
Quantum hardware on the cusp of adoption
Yet defence is only half the story. 2025 is shaping up as the year hardware finally caught headlines again. IBM’s Condor processor, unveiled at the end of 2023 with 1,121 superconducting qubits, became the first chip to break the four-figure barrier, a symbolic leap that researchers have chased for a decade. Condor isn’t actually all that useful in production because its error rates remain stubbornly high, but it proved IBM can manufacture quantum devices at a previously unthinkable scale.
In February 2025, Amazon’s AWS division revealed Ocelot, a prototype built around so-called cat qubits that suppress errors intrinsically. Amazon claims it can cut the qubit overhead for fault-tolerance by up to 90%, taking five years off the march to a practical machine.
But none of those bits of hardware will ever serve your WordPress blog. Quantum computers are still worse at most tasks than today’s tech and will function more like GPUs that are called on for specialised workloads, while classical CPUs keep handling log-ins and database calls.
Early quantum use in industry
Still, quantum use is slowly becoming a reality. In April 2025, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs and U.S. startup Qunnect sustained 99% fidelity entanglement over 30 kilometres of standard Berlin fibre for 17 straight days, then routed the same fragile photons 82 kilometres alongside ordinary internet traffic. It was an interesting view of what could soon happen.
At Cloudflare, the share of human-directed traffic using post-quantum TLS has already jumped from 2% in early 2024 to 35% this spring, and the company expects double-digit growth again by year-end.
But reissuing billions of certificates will be costly, the talent pool for quantum engineering is shallow, and we’re not fully sure whether quantum will make quite as much difference as science fiction outlooks think it might.
For now, web-infrastructure giants are hedging both bets. They’re adding opportunities to adopt quantum, while also building defences against it.
When quantum switches for lab demo to cloud product, their servers will already know how to talk to it – and more importantly, how to keep outsiders from listening in. If quantum comes to fruition in even a fraction of the form it’s promising, it could signal a massive change in hosting.
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