From escalating bot wars and record-breaking cyberattacks to rapid progress in post-quantum encryption, 2025 marks a pivotal year for the global Internet.
Cloudflare has released its sixth annual Year in Review, offering one of the most comprehensive snapshots of how the Internet evolved in 2025. Drawing on data from Cloudflare Radar and its global network, the report highlights major shifts in Internet usage, security threats, traffic patterns, and emerging technologies that are reshaping the digital landscape.
The findings show that global Internet traffic grew by 19% year over year, underlining how deeply digital services are now embedded in everyday life. This growth has been fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, with generative AI services continuing to gain mainstream traction. At the same time, the expanding digital footprint has exposed new vulnerabilities, driving an escalation in cyber warfare and large-scale attacks.
“The Internet isn’t just growing — it’s being fundamentally rewired, and defending it now means operating at unprecedented scale.”
— Matthew Prince, CEO and Co-founder, Cloudflare
One of the most notable milestones of 2025 was the rapid adoption of post-quantum encryption. According to Cloudflare, 52% of all human Internet traffic is now protected by post-quantum cryptography, a critical step toward safeguarding users against future quantum-enabled threats. However, this progress has been accompanied by a surge in hostile activity, including more than 25 record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks observed during the year.
The report also reveals how automated traffic continues to reshape the Internet. AI-driven bot activity intensified significantly, with Google’s crawling bot emerging as the single largest source of automated traffic online, dwarfing other AI bots. Meanwhile, cybercriminals shifted their focus toward softer but high-value targets. For the first time, civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector, reflecting the growing value of sensitive user data held by these entities.
Cloudflare’s analysis also points to the increasing role of governments in Internet disruptions. Nearly half of all major global outages in 2025 were linked to government actions, even as outages caused by physical cable cuts declined sharply. On the performance front, Europe led the world in Internet speed and quality, with several countries surpassing average download speeds of 200 Mbps.
Together, these insights underscore a year in which the Internet grew faster, became more secure in some areas, yet faced unprecedented pressure from evolving threats — reinforcing the need for resilience, transparency, and continuous innovation online.
