Cloudflare Report 2024: Global Internet Traffic Surges, US Leads in Bot Activity

Cloudflare has released its annual report on global internet trends for 2024, revealing a 17.2% increase in global internet traffic. As in previous years, Google remains the most popular online service, while the United States continues to lead as the primary source of bot traffic, accounting for more than one-third of the global volume.

According to the report, global internet traffic remained relatively stable in the first half of the year but began to surge in mid-August, peaking by late November—a trend observed for the third consecutive year. Notably, over 19% of all internet traffic now passes through Cloudflare’s web security systems.

The United States remains the dominant source of bot traffic, generating 34.6% of the global total. In comparison, Germany ranks second at 6.8%, followed by Iran, China, and Singapore. The United Kingdom rounds out the top six with 3.2%. This disparity is attributed to the high concentration of large tech companies in the U.S., which produce significant amounts of traffic. Amazon Web Services is the largest contributor to bot traffic, responsible for 12.7%, with Google following at 7.8%, driven primarily by the activity of its web-crawling Googlebot.

Cloudflare highlighted the growing presence of AI-driven bots, which garnered particular attention this year. These bots are frequently employed for web scraping and training artificial intelligence models. Among them, ByteDance’s Bytespider, associated with TikTok, was highly active early in the year before tapering off. Conversely, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot exhibited sharp spikes in activity throughout the year.

An unexpected finding in the report was a decline in IPv6 traffic, which accounted for 28.5% of total packets in 2024, down from 33.75% the previous year. This trend was surprising given ongoing global efforts to promote IPv6 adoption.

The report also revealed that 20.7% of all TCP connections were unexpectedly terminated before data exchange occurred. Causes range from DDoS attacks to client-side interruptions or content filtering by networks. Half of these incidents involved connections closed during the “Post SYN” phase—after the initial SYN packet was sent but before the ACK confirmation—often attributed to internet scanning or cyberattacks.

Mobile devices continue to play a significant role in internet traffic, accounting for 41.3% of global volume. Traffic distribution across platforms remains consistent: approximately one-third originates from iOS devices, while two-thirds come from Android. High-income countries such as the United States, Canada, Norway, and Sweden see a higher proportion of traffic from iPhones, whereas Android dominates in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Google Chrome remains the leading browser, accounting for 65.8% of all requests in 2024. Safari ranks second with 15.5%, driven by its popularity on iOS devices. Microsoft Edge holds 6.9%, while Firefox trails at 4%. Among search engines, Google maintains an overwhelming lead with over 88% of all queries. Yandex ranks second at 3.1%, followed by Baidu at 2.7%, and Bing at 2.6%. DuckDuckGo, known for its privacy focus, accounts for just 0.9%.

An intriguing detail is that 13% of TLS 1.3 traffic already employs post-quantum encryption, reflecting growing concerns over potential quantum computing threats and proactive measures by some companies to safeguard data.

The report also noted a significant rise in traffic requiring protection, with 6.5% of all data passing through Cloudflare blocked as a threat—an increase of one percentage point from the previous year. Albania (42.9%) and Libya lead in the proportion of blocked traffic. In the U.S., the share of blocked traffic rose from 3.65% to 5%, while South Korea saw a decline to 8.1%.

Cloudflare named Spain as the leader in download (292.6 Mbps) and upload speeds (192.6 Mbps). Countries with download speeds exceeding 200 Mbps dominated the top ten rankings.

Another study highlighted that nearly half of the world’s population experienced internet shutdowns due to political motives in 2022. Last year, 19 countries introduced new restrictions on internet access for their citizens, raising the total number of countries with such repressive measures to 32.