Cloudflare report reveals ‘a profound rewiring of the Internet’

Cloudflare’s sixth annual Radar review highlights a 19% surge in global internet traffic in 2025, driven by satellite networks, automated scraping, and large-scale attacks, signalling a profound rewiring of the internet’s architecture and security landscape.

Nobody would be surprised that communications traffic rose in 2025, but Cloudflare’s sixth annual Radar year‑in‑review paints a picture of acceleration and structural change , propelled by satellite networks, a surge in automated scraping, and increasingly large-scale attacks that together are “fundamentally rewired” the internet, the company says. According to the original report, global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with most of that expansion concentrated in the back half of the year after an August inflection point. ^[1][2]

Cloudflare based its analysis on telemetry from its global network footprint , present in 330 cities across more than 125 countries , which handles tens of millions of HTTP requests and DNS queries per second on behalf of millions of customer properties. Industry data shows traffic was relatively flat through mid‑April, rose to roughly 4–7% above baseline through mid‑August, and then accelerated steadily to peak year‑over‑year growth of 19%. The report notes the 2025 growth rate outpaced 2024 by about 10 percentage points and that the timing of this year’s acceleration shifted several weeks later than prior years. ^[1][2]

One of the clearest winners in that rewiring is SpaceX’s Starlink. By Cloudflare’s measure, request volume associated with Starlink’s primary autonomous system roughly doubled across 2025, with traffic rising 2.3x year‑over‑year and new service availability driving rapid local spikes as Starlink entered more than 20 additional countries and regions. The company claims those country rollouts are a primary driver of usage growth, even as Starlink suffered high‑visibility disruptions earlier in the year when a July outage affected tens of thousands of users. SpaceX continued to expand the constellation through December with multiple launches that added dozens of satellites per mission. ^[1][5][3][4]

Connectivity fragility was another prominent theme. Cloudflare reported that nearly half of the 174 major internet outages it observed in 2025 were the result of government‑directed regional or national shutdowns, while physical failures such as domestic and submarine cable cuts remained a leading cause of disruption. The report warned that such outages carry growing economic and social costs as services and education increasingly rely on continuous connectivity. ^[1][2]

Security and automation pressures compounded the technical changes. Cloudflare said it intercepted the largest DDoS assault on record , a multi‑Tbps attack that used UDP reflection and amplification vectors , and separately reported blocking over 416 billion AI bot scraping requests between July and December 2025 after making aggressive bot‑blocking the default for sites that do not pay for access. CEO and co‑founder Matthew Prince described the moment as one in which “the internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI [artificial intelligence], to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different.” Cloudflare warned these shifts threaten traditional traffic‑based business models as AI reduces direct site visits. ^[6][7][1]

Encryption and platform concentration were additional strands. According to Cloudflare’s press summary, post‑quantum encryption protections reached roughly half of human traffic in 2025, and Google and Meta remained at the top of service‑usage lists even as new entrants appeared across category rankings. The company also flagged civil society organisations as the sector most frequently targeted by attacks over the year. ^[2][1]

Taken together, the findings portray an internet scaling in volume while changing in architecture and risk profile: satellite mega‑constellations are moving traffic flows off established terrestrial backbones; automated AI actors and unprecedented DDoS campaigns are reshaping defence priorities; and state actions and cable faults continue to expose fragility. The company said it had blocked attacks and mitigated outages that, in some cases, redefined what “scale” means online , but its analysis also underscores the policy and engineering challenges ahead as the modern internet rewires itself. ^[1][6][7][2]

##Reference Map:

• ^[1] (Computer Weekly) – Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 3, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 5, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7
• ^[2] (Cloudflare press release) – Paragraph 1, Paragraph 2, Paragraph 4, Paragraph 6, Paragraph 7
• ^[3] (Space.com Dec 14, 2025) – Paragraph 3
• ^[4] (Space.com Dec 11, 2025) – Paragraph 3
• ^[5] (Reuters) – Paragraph 3
• ^[6] (Tom’s Hardware DDoS report) – Paragraph 5, Paragraph 7
• ^[7] (Tom’s Hardware AI bot blocking report) – Paragraph 5, Paragraph 7

Source: Fuse Wire Services