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

Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review analyzes global Internet trends observed across its network: traffic grew 19% with Starlink usage doubling; AI bots—especially Googlebot—dominated crawling and accounted for a notable share of HTML requests, while post‑quantum encrypted traffic rose to 52%. Security insights show 6% of traffic was mitigated, hyper‑volumetric DDoS attacks surged to 31.4 Tbps with peaks in late Q3–Q4, the U.S. and major clouds led bot origins, and over 5% of analyzed email was malicious (deceptive links, identity deception, brand impersonation). Connectivity and adoption highlights include steady HTTP/2/3 growth, 29% global IPv6 (67% in India), improved RPKI routing security, iOS at 35% of mobile traffic, and Europe leading speed metrics; nearly half of 174 major outages were government‑directed shutdowns.