Cloudflare Report: Internet grows by 19 percent, half uses quantum protection

Contents

Global internet traffic grew by 19 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year, with the increase becoming particularly significant from August onwards. This is according to the latest Cloudflare Radar Year in Review, which the internet company compiled based on an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second. The rapid rise of post-quantum encryption is noteworthy: 52 percent of human-generated web traffic already uses a technology designed to protect against attacks from future quantum computers.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince emphasizes the fundamental changes in the internet: “The internet isn't just changing; it's being completely reshaped – by AI, for instance, or by more creative and sophisticated attack methods.” The company celebrated several internet milestones this year but also fended off attacks that gave the term “scaling” a whole new meaning.

Googlebot as the largest bot traffic generator

Another finding from the report: Googlebot is the largest source of request traffic for Cloudflare, accounting for over 25 percent of verified bot traffic. The bot generates 4.5 percent of all HTML requests – more than all other AI bots combined with 4.2 percent. Google uses the bot not only for search indexing but also for training its AI models. So-called “user action” crawling for AI purposes has increased 15-fold.

In terms of generative AI services, ChatGPT leads globally, followed by competitors such as Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. In the social media sector, Snapchat has now overtaken X (formerly Twitter), while Google ranks first among the most used internet services for the fourth consecutive year. Instagram and YouTube climbed into the top 10.

DDoS attacks reach new dimensions

The security situation has significantly worsened: Cloudflare recorded over 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks (each exceeding 1 TBit/s), including the strongest DDoS attack to date with 29.7 TBit/s in the third quarter. The Aisuru botnet bombarded the target with 14.1 billion packets per second across 15,000 UDP ports. In total, Cloudflare registered 8.3 million attacks – equivalent to 3780 attacks per hour, a 15 percent increase compared to the previous quarter and 40 percent year-on-year.

For the first time, civil society organizations and NGOs are the most frequently attacked target group. Cloudflare attributes this to the particular value of sensitive data. Attacks on AI companies surged by 350 percent in September.

Outages and infrastructure trends

The report documents 174 major internet outages, nearly half of which were due to government-ordered shutdowns – often during elections or protests. Cable damage decreased by 50 percent, while power outages doubled. BGP route leaks continued to cause global routing problems, affecting German users through increased latency or reachability losses.

In satellite internet, Starlink traffic (AS14593) doubled, with the network expanding into over 20 new countries and regions. Mobile devices with iOS generated 35 percent of global mobile traffic, and in many countries, even over 50 percent of total device traffic. HTTPS connections reached a share of over 95 percent, while IPv6 globally remains below one-third of dual-stack requests – except India, where the share is over two-thirds.

Quantum security and regional differences

The 52 percent coverage with post-quantum encryption is remarkable, as Cloudflare itself only enabled the technology by default in October 2022. The rapid growth is due to browser updates that provide the necessary support. The implementation now protects against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where criminals collect encrypted data today to decrypt it later with quantum computers.

Europe leads in internet quality with download speeds exceeding 200 MBit/s, with Spain holding the top global position. In Germany, a similar picture emerges as in other European countries: strong mobile share, Chrome dominance, and low IPv6 deployment. The country-specific data available on the Cloudflare microsite allows for detailed comparisons for over 200 countries and regions, including Germany.

The report is based on data from January 1 to December 2, 2025, and uses a methodology consistent with previous years' reports. The Cloudflare network is present in 330 cities in over 125 countries and processes peak loads of over 129 million HTTP requests and 67 million DNS queries per second.

(fo)