The Internet plays a central role in both our personal and professional lives, and this year marked a notable shift in how much society depends on it – driven by significant growth and major technological changes.

Cloudflare‘s sixth annual Year in Review highlights the continually transformative nature of the Internet, providing a comprehensive view of how the Internet behaved in 2025.

The report – accompanied by a spotlight on the most popular Internet services – highlights the most significant Internet trends, traffic patterns, and security insights from the past year.

Global Internet traffic ballooned by 19% year-over-year, and we saw substantial changes and advanced capabilities introduced to AI.

At the same time, there were major milestones in security: post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats.

However, this growth also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.

“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI, to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, everyday is different. While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what ‘scale’ means, and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare.

“With a huge percentage of the Internet running through Cloudflare’s network every second of every day, we believe we have a unique responsibility to help navigate these changes and build a better Internet for everyone.”

The report found that Google and Meta have locked in their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in the booming generative AI category.

Google’s crawling bot dwarfed activity from all other leading AI bots, making it the single biggest source of automated Internet traffic.

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For the first time, civil society and non-profit organisations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.

Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed globally were triggered by government actions, even as outages caused by cable cuts dropped nearly 50% of those linked to power failures doubled.

European countries dominated global connectivity metrics, achieving the highest average download speeds, with Spain securing the top spot worldwide for overall Internet quality.