The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review: The rise of AI, post-quantum, and record-breaking DDoS attacks

The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review notes that global Internet traffic grew by 19% in 2025, with growth accelerating from August onwards. The report highlights Starlink traffic doubling in 2025, with growth in more than 20 new countries/regions, and Googlebot continuing to generate the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare as it crawled millions of sites.

Post-quantum encrypted traffic rose to 52% of human-generated Web traffic by early December, with 28 countries/regions more than doubling their share during the year. Mitigations of global traffic fell to 6.2% overall, while 3.3% of traffic was mitigated as DDoS or via WAF rules, and the United States accounted for 40% of global bot traffic.

The analysis also highlights that 29% of IPv6-capable requests were made over IPv6 globally, with India leading at 67%, and that almost half of major Internet outages in 2025 were government-directed shutdowns. These insights, according to Cloudflare Radar Year in Review, offer a snapshot of how AI trends, connectivity and security shaped the year.