Yeah, Cloudflare links are fine, it’s one of the more common ways of mitigating large volumes of traffic so sites don’t just fold in on themselves when they get linked to from places like Lemmy. Akamai is another one you might see, the general class of product is called a CDN.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

Not sure if a guy hiding in a mall rises to the level of “news”, but it made me smile so we’ll let the votes decide. :)