Cloudflare, Inc. released its sixth annual Year in Review, and reading through it feels less like skimming a statistics report and more like watching a time-lapse of the Internet reshaping itself while everyone was busy refreshing feeds and joining video calls. Traffic surged another 19% year over year, which sounds abstract until you remember this growth is stacked on top of an already massive baseline, and much of that increase is now AI-driven rather than purely human. What stands out, almost quietly, is how infrastructure decisions made far from public view have started to matter as much as apps and platforms. Post-quantum encryption now protects more than half of all human Internet traffic, which is one of those milestones that will barely trend on social media yet fundamentally changes what “secure by default” means going forward. At the same time, Cloudflare’s network recorded more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks, redefining scale in a way that makes last decade’s cyber incidents feel almost quaint.
The power dynamics of the Internet, meanwhile, look oddly stable at the very top and wildly unstable everywhere else. Google and Meta continue to dominate global Internet services for the fourth year running, an almost boring consistency, while ChatGPT remains the most popular service in the generative AI category, cementing the idea that conversational interfaces are no longer experimental toys but mainstream infrastructure. Beneath that surface, though, automation has taken on a life of its own. Google’s crawling bot now dwarfs all other AI bots combined, effectively becoming the single largest source of automated traffic on the web. That detail matters more than it sounds, because it shapes how content is discovered, indexed, summarized, and ultimately monetized, and it adds pressure to a content economy that Cloudflare itself notes is facing stark challenges. The Internet isn’t just humans talking to humans anymore; it’s increasingly machines talking to machines, sometimes about us, sometimes instead of us.
Security trends in the report read like a shift in battlefield geography. For the first time, civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector, a sobering signal that threat actors are targeting data sensitivity and trust rather than just corporate balance sheets. Governments also emerged as the leading cause of major Internet outages, responsible for nearly half of all large disruptions observed globally. Interestingly, classic causes like cable cuts dropped sharply, while power-related outages doubled, hinting at how physical infrastructure stress and policy decisions now intertwine with digital resilience. It’s a reminder that the Internet may feel abstract, but it still depends on electricity, geography, and human choices made under pressure.
Then there’s Europe, quietly winning the connectivity race. European countries dominated global speed and quality rankings, with average download speeds exceeding 200 Mbps and Spain taking the top spot overall. This isn’t just a bragging-rights statistic; it reshapes where cloud services perform best, where remote work feels frictionless, and where new digital businesses can realistically scale without fighting latency at every turn. All of these insights come from Cloudflare Radar, built on aggregated and anonymized data flowing through a network spanning more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, plus signals from the widely used 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Put together, the picture that emerges is subtle but unmistakable: the Internet in 2025 didn’t just grow, it changed character, becoming faster, more automated, more encrypted, and paradoxically more fragile in places where policy and power intersect. It’s the kind of transformation you only really notice when someone pauses the video and lets you see all the layers at once.
