Cloudflare has dropped its sixth annual Year in Review, and the picture it paints of the internet in 2025 is both impressive and unsettling. On one hand, global connectivity keeps getting faster, more encrypted, and more deeply woven into everyday life. On the other, the year exposed how fragile the online world can be when governments, bots, and attackers all push at the same time.
According to Cloudflare, global internet traffic jumped by 19 percent year over year. That alone says a lot about how dependent society has become on always-on connectivity, especially as work, entertainment, shopping, and even basic services continue to move online. What stood out to me, though, is that this growth did not come from a calm, stable environment. It came alongside a surge in attacks, outages, and increasingly aggressive automation.
One of the biggest themes in the report is what Cloudflare bluntly describes as intensifying bot wars. Automated traffic is nothing new, but 2025 showed just how lopsided this battlefield has become. Google’s crawler activity completely dwarfed that of other AI and indexing bots, making it the single largest source of automated internet traffic. That raises uncomfortable questions about balance and power. When one company’s bots dominate so much of the automated layer of the web, smaller publishers and independent sites are left wondering who really controls discovery and visibility online.
Generative AI traffic also continued its climb. ChatGPT remained the most popular service in the generative AI category, which is not surprising given how embedded it has become in workflows and consumer tools. Still, popularity does not automatically mean sustainability. Many content creators are already feeling the strain as AI systems consume massive amounts of material while traditional traffic and ad models struggle to keep up. Cloudflare’s data does not solve that problem, but it makes it harder to ignore.
Security was another defining storyline in 2025. Post-quantum encryption quietly crossed a major threshold, now protecting 52 percent of all human internet traffic observed by Cloudflare. That is a big deal, even if most users have no idea it is happening. The shift is about preparing for a future where today’s encryption could be broken by quantum computers. Seeing adoption reach this level suggests that large parts of the internet are finally taking that future seriously instead of treating it as a distant research problem.
At the same time, attackers were not slowing down. Cloudflare reports more than 25 record-breaking distributed denial of service attacks over the year, redefining what scale means in practical terms. These were not just technical stunts. They had real-world consequences, knocking services offline and disrupting access at moments when people increasingly expect reliability as a given.
One of the more troubling trends was a shift in who gets targeted. For the first time, civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector. That feels like a grim milestone. These groups often operate with limited budgets and aging infrastructure, yet they hold sensitive personal data and play key roles in advocacy, aid, and community support. Going after them is not just about money. It is about pressure, intimidation, and influence.
Internet outages told their own story in 2025. Nearly half of major disruptions globally were linked to government actions. Cable cuts dropped sharply, while power-related outages doubled. The takeaway here is not subtle. Political decisions and state-level interventions are now one of the biggest factors shaping whether people can get online at all. For anyone who still thinks of the internet as a neutral, borderless space, that idea looks increasingly outdated.
Not all the news was bleak. Europe dominated global internet quality rankings, with multiple countries posting average download speeds above 200 Mbps. Spain came out on top overall, which shows that investment in infrastructure can still pay off in tangible ways. Speed and reliability matter, especially as applications become heavier and more interactive.
All of this data comes from Cloudflare Radar, which pulls from Cloudflare’s massive global network and its widely used 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. The company has visibility into a huge portion of internet traffic, and while that does not make it the sole authority on how the web works, it does give its annual review real weight.
What struck me most reading this year’s report is how clearly 2025 marked a turning point. The internet is faster and more encrypted than ever, but it is also more centralized, more contested, and more political. Bot traffic is exploding, governments are pulling more levers, and attackers are choosing targets that say a lot about shifting priorities.
Cloudflare frames this as a responsibility to help build a better internet. That is fair, but it also highlights how much influence a handful of large infrastructure companies now wield. Whether that concentration ultimately helps or hurts the open web is still an open question, and one worth watching closely as 2026 approaches.
