Cloudflare, a security, performance and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, has published its sixth annual Year in Review, offering 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 rapid growth and major technological change. Global Internet traffic grew by 19% year on year, while significant advances were introduced across AI capabilities. At the same time, there were major security milestones: post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human Internet traffic, helping protect users against future threats. However, this growth also brought challenges, including a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare that resulted in more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.
“The Internet isn’t just changing; it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI to increasingly creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and Co-founder of Cloudflare. “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. With a huge proportion 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 into the evolving Internet landscape to help keep the online world more informed, resilient and secure. Key highlights from 2025 include:
- Google and Meta maintain their dominance: Google and Facebook (now Meta) retained their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT held on to the top spot in the rapidly growing Generative AI category.
- AI bot activity intensifies: Google’s crawling bot far exceeded the activity of other leading AI bots, making it the single largest source of automated Internet traffic.
- Cybercriminals target new sectors: For the first time, civil society and non-profit organisations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.
- Governments emerge as the leading cause of outages: Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed globally were triggered by government actions. Meanwhile, outages caused by cable cuts fell by almost 50%, while those linked to power failures doubled.
- Europe leads on Internet speed and quality: European countries dominated global connectivity metrics, recording the highest average download speeds (all above 200 Mbps), with Spain securing the top position worldwide for overall Internet quality.
