Cloudflare has released its annual Internet Radar Report 2024, revealing key global Internet traffic, security, and connectivity trends. The report shows that global internet traffic grew by 17.2% this year, with Google, Facebook, Apple, TikTok, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) emerging as the most popular internet services. One notable trend highlighted in the report is the significant amount of traffic AI crawlers generate.
These bots scan the web to gather data for training purposes and have come under scrutiny due to concerns about unauthorized data collection. Cloudflare monitors AI bot traffic to identify the most aggressive and high-volume crawlers, with top culprits including “facebookexternalhit” (bot) (27.16%), Bytespider (23.35%), Amazonbot (13.34%), Anthropic’s ClaudeBot (8.06%), and GPTBot (5.60%). The report also provides insights into the usage of HTTP protocols.
HTTP/2 accounts for nearly half of web requests (49.6%), while HTTP/1 and HTTP/3 represent 29.9% and 20.5% of web traffic, respectively. Cloudflare analyzed Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections and found that 20.7% were terminated prematurely due to various causes, including denial-of-service attacks, network scanning, client disconnects, and technical issues. Regarding email security, Cloudflare’s findings reveal that 4.3% of the trillions of emails sent this year were malicious.
Cloudflare internet trends for 2024
Most of these harmful emails contained deceptive links (42.9%) or deceptive identities (35.1%). Emails from certain domains, such as .bar, .rest, and .uno, were predominantly spam or malicious.
The report documented 225 major internet outages worldwide, with the majority occurring in Africa, the Middle East, and India. Over half of these outages were government-directed shutdowns, while others were due to cable cuts, power outages, technical issues, weather, maintenance, and cyberattacks. Cloudflare ranked nations based on internet quality, focusing on upload and download speeds and latency.
Spain led with download speeds of 292.6 Mbps and upload speeds of 192.6 Mbps. Globally, approximately 41.3% of internet traffic came from mobile devices, with laptops and PCs accounting for 58.7%. In regions like Cuba and Syria, mobile devices dominated internet usage, making up 77% of traffic.
The 2024 report provides a detailed look at the ever-changing digital landscape, highlighting the rise of AI crawlers, global internet connectivity, and security trends. The findings underscore the dynamic nature of the internet and the ongoing challenges in maintaining its security and reliability.
Noah Nguyen is a multi-talented developer who brings a unique perspective to his craft. Initially a creative writing professor, he turned to Dev work for the ability to work remotely. He now lives in Seattle, spending time hiking and drinking craft beer with his fiancee.
