Cloudflare has recently published the fifth edition of its Radar Year in Review, a report analyzing data from the global hyperscaler network. The results reveal a 17.2% increase in global internet traffic, with notable growth in mobile and IPv6 requests. Additionally, Go overtook Node.js as the most popular language for automated API requests and GitHub Copilot saw significant growth.
Before presenting the key findings, David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare, explains why the company publishes the report and highlights its unique position in monitoring global internet traffic:
Cloudflare’s network currently spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries/regions, serving an average of over 63 million HTTP(S) requests per second for millions of Internet properties, in addition to handling over 42 million DNS requests per second on average. The resulting data generated by this usage, combined with data from other complementary Cloudflare tools, enables Radar to provide unique near-real time perspectives on the patterns and trends around security, traffic, performance, and usage that we observe across the Internet.
The report, organized into five sections - Traffic, Adoption & Usage, Connectivity, Security, and Email Security - covers the first 11 months of the year. Belson writes:
Throughout the first half of 2024, worldwide Internet traffic growth appeared to be fairly limited, within a percent or two on either side of the baseline value through mid-August. However, at that time growth clearly began to accelerate, climbing consistently through the end of November, growing 17.2% for the year. This trend is similar to those also seen in 2023 and 2022.
Source: Cloudflare blog
Although approximately 70% of the world’s population uses smartphones, mobile traffic is not surging. Mobile devices account for 41.3% of global traffic, a percentage consistent with previous years. However, in nearly 100 countries, the majority of internet traffic originates from mobile devices. These countries are primarily located in the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and South/Central America. Among providers, Starlink experienced 3.3x growth.
The report includes information on the most popular search engines (Google), AI platforms (OpenAI), messaging services (WhatsApp), and e-commerce platforms (Amazon). The networking section emphasizes that nearly half of all web requests used HTTP/2, while 20.5% utilized HTTP/3. Additionally, 13.0% of TLS 1.3 traffic now employs post-quantum encryption, a topic recently covered on InfoQ in relation to both cloud and Java adoption.
When evaluating language popularity, React, PHP, and jQuery are among the most widely used ones for building websites, while Go has surpassed Node.js as the most popular language for automated API requests. Cameron Balahan, product lead for Go at Google, comments:
This is a pretty big deal and corroborates the amazing growth we've seen elsewhere.
The report reveals that 20.7% of TCP connections are anomalous, unexpectedly terminating before any useful data is exchanged. This can result from DoS attacks, unusual client behavior, or third-party connection tampering. Alarmingly, Log4j vulnerabilities remain a persistent threat and continued to be actively targeted throughout 2024. Belson warns:
In 2024, three years after the initial Log4j disclosure, we found that Log4j remains an active threat. Log4j attack activity appeared to trend generally upwards across the year (...) Log4j ranges from approximately 4x to over 20x the activity seen for Atlassian Confluence Code Injection, and as much as 100x the aggregated activity seen for Authentication Bypass or Remote Code Injection vulnerabilities.
In a companion article covering the top Internet services across multiple industries, Cloudflare highlights the rise of GitHub Copilot in generative AI and the disappointing trends for Google Gemini and Hugging Face. João Tomé, senior data editor at Cloudflare, writes:
GitHub Copilot experienced the fastest rise, entering the Top 10 in September (after reaching the Top 20 in June) and staying mostly between #5 and #3 by November. Some platforms lost ground in the rankings (...) Tabnine, another AI-powered coding assistant, held the #5 spot for months but slipped after July. Google Gemini (...) dropped out of the Top 10 after July as newer AI platforms gained momentum. Hugging Face mostly fluctuated (...) However, it fell out of the Top 10 by September.
Source: Cloudflare blog
The Cloudflare Radar 2024 Year In Review microsite provides more detailed data, including trends for specific countries and regions.
