Both addresses were given to Cloudflare by the owner, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, in exchange for allowing APNIC to study the "garbage traffic" sent to Cloudflare.

"We think DNS-over-HTTPS is particularly promising — fast, easier to parse, and encrypted," the company's Matthew Prince said in a blog post.

"To date, Google was the only scale provider supporting DNS-over-HTTPS. For obvious reasons, however, non-Chrome browsers and non-Android operating systems have been reluctant to build a service that sends data to a competitor.

"We're hoping that with an independent DNS-over-HTTPS service now available, we'll see more experiments from browsers, operating systems, routers, and apps to support the protocol."

Prince pointed out that any DNS provider would be able to know the websites that an individual visited when using its service. Additionally, DNS could also be used a tool of censorship.

"The insecurity of the DNS infrastructure struck the team at Cloudflare as a bug at the core of the Internet, so we set out to do something about it," he said.

"Given we run one of the largest, most interconnected global networks — and have a lot of experience with DNS — we were well positioned to launch a consumer DNS service."

Prince said that the DNS provided by Cloudflare would not write querying IP addresses to disk and would also wipe all logs within 24 hours, with accounting firm KPMG to audit this.

He said it had decided to launch the service on 1 April so that it would be noticed.

"Never mind that it was a Sunday. Never mind that it was on Easter and during Passover. Never mind that it was April Fools Day — a day where tech companies often trot out fictional services they think are cute while the media and the rest of the non-tech world collectively roll their eyes."