Intensifying bot wars, a sharp rise in attacks on civil society organizations, and rapid progress in post-quantum encryption mark a pivotal year online
Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, published its sixth annual Year in Review, one of the most comprehensive views of how the Internet behaved in 2025. The report—accompanied by a spotlight on the most popular Internet services—highlights the most significant Internet trends, traffic patterns, and security insights from the past year.
The Internet plays a central role in both our personal and professional lives, and this year marked a notable shift in how much society depends on it—driven by significant growth and major technological changes. Global Internet traffic ballooned by 19% year-over-year, and we saw substantial changes and advanced capabilities introduced to AI. At the same time, there were major milestones in security: post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats. However, this growth also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.
“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI, to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different. While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what ‘scale’ means, and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare. “With a huge percentage of the Internet running through Cloudflare’s network every second of every day, we believe we have a unique responsibility to help navigate these changes and build a better Internet for everyone.”
Cloudflare’s Year in Review shares key data insights about the changing Internet landscape to help keep the online world more informed, resilient, and secure. Top highlights of 2025 include:
- Google and Meta’s Reign Continues at the Top: Google and Facebook (now Meta) locked in their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in the booming Generative AI category.
- The AI Bot Wars Heat Up with a Single Dominant Player: Google’s crawling bot dwarfed activity from all other leading AI bots, making it the single biggest source of automated Internet traffic.
- Cybercriminals Pivot to New Vulnerable Targets: For the first time, civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.
- Governments Lead as the Top Cause of Major Outages: Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed globally were triggered by government actions, even as outages caused by cable cuts dropped nearly 50% and those linked to power failures doubled.
- Europe Leads the World in Internet Speed and Quality: European countries dominated global connectivity metrics, achieving the highest average download speeds (all above 200 Mbps), with Spain securing the top spot worldwide for overall Internet quality.
This data comes from Cloudflare Radar, a free tool that lets anyone view global trends and insights across the Internet. Radar is powered by data from Cloudflare’s global network (one of the world’s largest, spanning 330+ cities in 120+ countries) and aggregated and anonymized data from Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 public DNS Resolver, widely used as a fast and private way to browse the Internet.
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