Cloudflare Radar

2022 Year in Review

Anyone following recent technology headlines might assume that the Internet's trend of incredible growth would have finally begun to falter. Times like these require data, and ours indicates that global Internet traffic growth is as robust as ever, with variability at the location level.

This trend line starts mid-January to allow for peoples' Internet activity to return to normal following New Year's activities.

The rich variety of content on the Internet led us to wonder what categories of Internet services were the most popular over the course of the year.

The bars represent how traffic was distributed across each category in the list throughout the year on a weekly basis.

Seeing Google as the Internet's most popular Internet service in our general top 10 ranking may not surprise you. However, you're sure to find names you may not have expected or even encountered before in our category specific lists.

Our ranking methodology is based on aggregate data from 1.1.1.1.

Bot traffic describes any non-human Internet traffic, and monitoring bot levels can help spot potential malicious activities. Of course, bots can be helpful too, and Cloudflare maintains a list of verified bots to help keep the Internet healthy.

We observed many locations seeing volatility in bot traffic volumes throughout the year.

Quite a few different locations found their way into the top 10 this year.

The rankings are based on the percentage of bot traffic, calculated on a weekly basis.

The Internet plays an increasingly significant role in people's lives, but not everyone has reliable Internet access. Outages can be inadvertently caused by events like natural disasters or can occur when a government deliberately shuts down connectivity.

The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center tracks these Internet disruptions, and uses Cloudflare traffic data for insights into their scope and duration.

SpaceX Starlink promises satellite Internet in previously underserved or unserved locations. We analyzed aggregate Cloudflare traffic volumes associated with the service's autonomous system (AS14593) during 2022.

Graphs will not be displayed for locations where Cloudflare has not observed meaningful 1.1.1.1 Starlink traffic.

The trend line is scaled relative to the actual traffic data, where Max is the peak observed request volume and 0 means no traffic was observed.

Mastodon experienced an inflection point in usage this year. We analyzed aggregate 1.1.1.1 request data for 400 top Mastodon instances to observe how interest changed during 2022.

Graphs will not be displayed for locations where Cloudflare has not observed meaningful 1.1.1.1 Mastodon-related traffic.

The trend line is scaled relative to the actual traffic data, where Max is the peak observed request volume and 0 means no traffic was observed.

We have been passionate about IPv6 adoption for many years because it plays a critical role in the scalability of the Internet. One day, IPv4 addressing will become a thing of the past. But until then, we continue to call for greater IPv6 adoption.

We analyzed requests for dual stacked content that were made over IPv6 to calculate IPv6 adoption rates.

India consistently had the highest level of IPv6 adoption in 2022. In contrast, other locations fluctuated within the top 10.

Rankings are based on the percentage of requests for dual stacked content made over IPv6, calculated on a weekly basis.

It's no surprise that mobile devices are everywhere, but mobile usage trends give insights into where Internet traffic growth may be hottest in the future.

Our data shows locations in Africa and the Middle East topped the charts this year.

Rankings are based on the percentage of requests made using mobile devices, calculated on a weekly basis.

DDoS mitigation techniques and Web Application Firewalls are the two most effective defences against Application Layer (Layer 7) attacks. These attacks can take a high traffic website down for hours or steal customer data.

The graph shows the percentage of attacks mitigated by each product group on a daily basis.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a shield placed between a business' web application and the Internet. This shield applies rules to protect against vulnerabilities by filtering out malicious traffic.

The bars in the chart represent the percentage of rules applied by the Cloudflare WAF used to mitigate attacks, calculated on a weekly basis.

While we can't predict which industry attackers will target the most, we do know all industries get attacked. No matter the industry, your best bet is to keep your guard up.

The bars represent the percentage of mitigated traffic associated with each category, calculated on a weekly basis.

Phishing emails can trick you into providing attackers with login credentials for everything from e-commerce sites to employee data systems. Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security can prevent them from ever reaching your inbox.

We found that the United States was the top source of phishing emails.

Rankings are based on the volume of phishing emails identified by Cloudflare Area 1 that originated from IP addresses which geolocate to the named location.