He global internet traffic continues to grow at a dizzying rate. Only in 2024 it increased by 17.2%according to data from the 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review report, published by the company for the fifth consecutive year, and which reviews information on connectivity, security, use of devices for Internet access and frequency of blackouts, among other trends.
According to this report, and to the surprise of practically no one at this point, the most popular Internet services in the world are Google, Facebook, Apple, TikTok and AWS. Chrome, with 65.8% of Internet users as users, is the most used browser in the world. WhatsApp remains the most popular messaging application.
React, PHP and JQuery are among the most popular web development technologies. HubSpot, Google, and WordPress are among the most popular providers of support services and platforms. Additionally, Go has surpassed NodeJS as the most popular language for making automated API requests.
AI trackers among the largest sources of traffic
AI trackers are a great source of traffic, although they are increasingly raising suspicions for their activity. Basically, they are dedicated to scan the web to collect large amounts of data to train large language models. It is quite worrying that some collect data without having permission to do so, compared to “good” and verified bots, which usually originate from search engines and are transparent about what they are and what they do. GoogleBot, Qualys or BingBot fall into this group.
Cloudflare, among other things, tracks AI-related traffic to determine which bots are the most aggressive, which have the highest volume of requests, and which bots crawl regularly. According to the researchers who carried out the report, the so-called facebookexternalhit is the one that has generated the most traffic of all during the year: 27.16%. They are followed by Bytespider, from ByteDance, with 23.35%; Amazonbot, with 13.34%, ClaudeBot, from Anthropic, with 8.06%; and GPTBot, with 5.60%.
Apparently, the traffic generated by Bytespider, the bot owned by the owner of TikTok, has been gradually decreasing during 2024. In the final weeks of the year it generated between 80% and 85% less traffic than at the beginning. Meanwhile, ClaudeBot’s registered a very pronounced rise towards the middle of 2024, and then fell sharply again.
HTTP y TCP
The majority of web requests are still from HTTP2, which was launched in 2015, and still accounts for 49.6% of them. 29.9% are still from the original HPPT, standardized in 1996, while only 20.5% are from HTTP3, deployed in 2022.
Cloudflare also records, in addition to HTTP traffic, connections made through the TCP transmission protocol, which ensures reliable data transfer between network devices. In 2024, 20.7% of TCP connections terminated unexpectedly before they could result in an exchange of useful data.
These anomalies in TCP connections can be due to several reasons. These include denial of service (DoS) attacks, network scanning, client disconnections, connection manipulation, or what Cloudflare has called “unusual client behavior.”
The majority of TCP connection outages identified by Cloudflare occurred in 2024 after a server received a sync request but before it received an acknowledgment of the request.
Security and devices used in the Internet connection
Regarding security, Cloudflare has indicated that only 4.3% of emails sent in 2024 were malicious. These included mostly fake links (42.9%) or fake identities (35.1%). In 70% of cases, both methods were used.
As curious data regarding security, the company assures that the Log4j vulnerability is still used as an attack method, and is used much more actively than other common vulnerabilities. Additionally, virtually all emails processed by Cloudflare with .bar, .rest, and .uno domains were either spam emails or messages that were directly malicious.
In 2024, on the other hand, there were 225 major internet outages. Most occurred in Africa, the Middle East or India. More than half were blackouts ordered directly by governments, while others were due to other causes.
Among them, cable cuts, electrical blackouts, technical or maintenance problems, serious weather episodes or cyber attacks. Many lasted only a few hours, while others, like the one experienced in Bangladesh in July, lasted 10 days. Among these blackouts is also the one caused by the CrowdStrike incident last summer.
Internet connection quality
Another aspect discussed in the report is the quality of the countries’ Internet connection, based on their upload speed, download speed and latency. Spainwith a average download speed of 292.6 Mbps, and 192.6 Mbps upload speed, leading in connection speed. All developed countries have download speeds above 200 Mbps on average.
41.3% of global Internet traffic comes from mobile devices, with the other 58.7% occurring on laptops and desktop computers. Of course, in around a hundred countries in the world, the majority of traffic in 2024 comes from mobile devices. Cuba and Syria have the highest mobile device traffic, 77%.
Other areas of high traffic demand for devices of this type are the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Central and South America. In this aspect, traffic measurements are similar to those of 2023 and 2022.
