Backblaze released its Q1 2026 Performance Stats report, as the second installment in its quarterly cloud storage performance testing series.
The report expands testing to EU-Central for the first time and reveals that cloud storage performance varies meaningfully across geographies. As part of an ongoing, transparent benchmarking initiative, Performance Stats aims to build a repeatable, industry-wide dataset and testing methodology to help developers, IT leaders and researchers evaluate cloud storage performance over time.
This quarter’s report tests Backblaze B2, AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, and Wasabi Object Storage across US-East and EU-Central. Backblaze published the full testing methodology, allowing technology companies, researchers and end users to replicate tests, scrutinize the data and contribute to building better benchmarks.
Because unbiased performance testing is historically difficult to execute without favoring the testing provider, Backblaze runs all tests from outside its own infrastructure.
“The goal of Performance Stats has always been to give the industry a transparent, replicable look at how cloud storage actually performs,” said Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze. “This quarter’s report signals our intent to be an authority in data storage performance on a global scale.”
Key Findings from Q1 2026 Testing
The report reveals significant performance variation across providers and regions, with different architectures excelling under different conditions.
According to Backblaze, AWS is commonly assumed to be the default choice, but the data shows no provider performs consistently across regions or workloads.
- Average upload and download times improved across nearly all providers and file sizes compared to the fourth quarter of 2025. Backblaze led upload averages for 256KiB and 5MiB files, with Wasabi taking the 2MiB category, a reversal from Q4 2025, when AWS led for both 2MiB and 5MiB file sizes.
- Provider rankings shifted significantly between US-East and EU-Central. Cloudflare R2 performed notably well on EU upload and download averages, while Wasabi led several EU upload throughput categories. No single provider dominated across both regions, making a strong case for multi-cloud architecture rather than reliance on a single vendor.
- As in Q3 2025, the spread between highest and lowest throughput values per file size remains wide, particularly in multi-threaded tests, where each provider’s underlying architectural decisions show up most clearly. Average speeds alone are an incomplete picture.
- Across both regions and most providers, throughput rises sharply from the 256KiB to 5MiB file size, then plateaus. This early trend has held quarter-over-quarter and will continue to be tracked as the dataset matures.
To download the full report, click here.
