Publishing its sixth annual year in review, Cloudflare offered a comprehensive view of how the Internet behaved in 2025, highlighting the most significant trends, traffic patterns and security insights.

The report comes just weeks after Cloudflare itself experienced a significant outage that impacted its services worldwide.

“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.”

As the Internet continues to play a critical role in everyone’s lives, both personal and professional, Cloudflare said 2025 marked a significant shift in how much society depends on it.

Notably, global Internet traffic ballooned by 19% year-over-year, with substantial changes and more advanced capabilities introduced to AI. Simultaneously, post-quantum encryptions reached major milestones in security and now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats.

However, such growth also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare’s top highlights of 2025 include:

Google and Meta’s reign continues: Google and Facebook (now Meta) remain the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth year running, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in generative AI (Gen AI).

The AI bot wars “heat up”: A significant dominant player has emerged, Cloudflare said, as Google’s 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 organisations have become the most attacked sector. Cloudflare said this is likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.

Governments the top cause of major outages: Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed around the world were triggered by government actions – even as outages caused by cable cuts dropped by nearly 50% and those linked to power failures doubled.

Europe leads the world in Internet speed and quality: Cloudflare said 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.

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