Global Internet traffic grew by 19 percent in 2025, but the expansion was accompanied by intensifying cyber threats, a surge in automated activity, and an increase in government-driven Internet disruptions, according to connectivity cloud firm Cloudflare.
In its annual Year in Review report, Cloudflare said the past year marked a turning point for the Internet as growing dependence on digital services collided with escalating cyber warfare and rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
The company recorded more than 25 record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in 2025, reflecting what it described as a sharp rise in both the scale and sophistication of cyberattacks.
Cloudflare said the attacks underscored how threat actors are increasingly capable of overwhelming even large online infrastructures.
Civil society and non-profit organizations emerged as the most attacked sector globally, overtaking traditional targets such as financial institutions and technology companies.
Cloudflare said the shift was likely driven by the sensitive nature of the data held by these organizations, as well as their relatively limited cybersecurity resources.
Automated traffic also continued to reshape Internet activity, with so-called “bot wars” intensifying throughout the year.
Cloudflare said Google’s crawling bot dominated AI-driven automation, making it the single largest source of bot-generated traffic observed on its network.
Despite the growing threat environment, Cloudflare reported progress in online security. Post-quantum encryption, designed to protect data from future quantum computing attacks, now secures 52 percent of all human Internet traffic passing through the company’s network.
The report also pointed to governments as a major source of Internet instability in 2025. Nearly half of all major Internet outages recorded globally were triggered by government actions, including shutdowns and restrictions.
At the same time, outages caused by undersea cable cuts fell by nearly 50 percent, while those linked to power failures doubled.
In terms of Internet usage, Google and Facebook, now under Meta Platforms, remained the world’s most popular online services for the fourth consecutive year.
ChatGPT continued to lead the generative artificial intelligence category, reflecting sustained growth in AI-powered platforms.
Cloudflare also highlighted regional disparities in Internet performance.
European countries dominated global rankings for Internet speed and quality, with average download speeds exceeding 200 megabits per second. Spain ranked first worldwide based on a combination of speed, reliability, and latency metrics.
Cloudflare’s findings are based on aggregated and anonymized data from its global network spanning more than 330 cities across over 120 countries, as well as information from its public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.
The company said the trends underscore the growing need for stronger Internet resilience as digital infrastructure becomes increasingly central to economic activity, everyday life, and governance.
