Global internet traffic grew 19% year over year in 2025, alongside sharper growth in artificial intelligence (AI) tools and an increase in cyberattacks, according to Cloudflare’s sixth annual Year in Review.
Post-quantum encryption now protects 52% of all human internet traffic, a shift to guard data against future threats that could break today’s encryption methods. Cloudflare said it blocked more than 25 record-setting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks during the year, showing what it described as a growing scale of cyber warfare.
“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare. “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.”
The report reviews how the internet behaved throughout 2025, using data from Cloudflare’s global network and its Radar platform, which tracks traffic, outages, and security trends. It also includes a ranking of the most used internet services worldwide.
Key findings from the report show that Google and Meta remained the two most popular internet services globally for the fourth straight year. ChatGPT continued to rank first among generative AI (GenAI) services.
Cloudflare also observed an increase in automated traffic. Google’s web crawling bot generated more activity than any other AI bot, making it the largest single source of automated internet traffic.
Attack patterns shifted during the year. For the first time, civil society and non-profit organizations became the most targeted sector, which Cloudflare linked to the sensitive nature and potential value of the data these groups handle.
Internet outages were also increasingly tied to government actions. Nearly half of major disruptions worldwide were caused by government-related events. Outages from cable cuts fell by almost 50%, while those linked to power failures doubled.
On connectivity, European countries led global rankings for internet speed and quality. Several recorded average download speeds above 200 Mbps, with Spain ranking highest overall.
Cloudflare Radar is a free public tool that uses aggregated and anonymized information from Cloudflare’s network, which spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, and from its 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver.