Cybersecurity company Cloudflare’s latest analysis , , the 2025 Web Traffic and Security Report, highlights that in 2025 the web continued to grow steadily, while security threats and large-scale outages reached new highs.
Drawing from traffic observed across millions of protected sites and applications, Cloudflare found that Google continued to dominate global search traffic, accounting for nearly 90% of referrals worldwide in 2025. Bing trailed far behind at just over 3%, followed by Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo. While Google’s grip weakened slightly on desktop systems—particularly Windows, where Bing reached 14%—mobile search traffic remained overwhelmingly Google-driven.
Browser usage showed similar consistency. Chrome generated roughly two-thirds of global traffic, with Safari firmly in second place due to its dominance on iOS devices. Regional differences persisted: Yandex Browser captured roughly a third of browser traffic in Russia, while Safari accounted for nearly 80% of traffic on iPhones and iPads.
Connectivity disruptions remained a persistent global issue. Cloudflare tracked more than 170 major Internet outages in 2025, nearly half of which were caused by government-directed shutdowns. Many were implemented to prevent exam cheating, while others followed protests, political unrest, or directives from ruling authorities.
Physical infrastructure failures were another major contributor. Submarine and terrestrial fiber cuts disrupted connectivity across multiple countries, while fires, storms, and natural disasters caused prolonged outages in several regions.
IPv6 Adoption Grew
IPv6 adoption continued to rise, but progress remained uneven. Globally, 29% of IPv6-capable requests used IPv6, up slightly from 2024. India remained the clear leader, with more than two-thirds of traffic using IPv6, while dozens of countries still recorded adoption rates below 10%.
Routing security also improved incrementally. The share of globally valid RPKI routes increased across both IPv4 and IPv6, continuing a multi-year trend toward safer Internet routing, though large gaps remain.
European countries dominated global rankings for Internet performance, with Spain standing out for both download and upload speeds, as well as low latency. Meanwhile, mobile traffic growth appeared to stabilize. Mobile devices accounted for 43% of global requests, a modest increase year over year, suggesting mobile Internet usage may be reaching a steady state in many regions.
Security: Bigger Attacks, More Bots, Persistent Email Abuse
Security trends were among the most striking findings. Over 6% of global traffic was mitigated by Cloudflare systems in 2025, either as malicious or due to customer-defined controls.
Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks grew significantly. After peaking below 10 Tbps (Terabits per second) for much of the year, attacks surged past 30 Tbps by November, setting new records for scale. Packet-based attacks also intensified, with a 14 Bpps (billion packets per second) attack marking the largest seen during the year.
Bot traffic remained heavily concentrated in cloud infrastructure. The U.S. accounted for 40% of global bot traffic, with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure together responsible for a substantial share.
Email threats continued to rise as well. More than 5% of analyzed emails were malicious, with deceptive links, identity deception, and brand impersonation dominating attack techniques. Certain top-level domains stood out for abuse, with nearly all email from domains such as .christmas and .lol classified as spam or malicious.
A Stable Internet, Under Growing Pressure
Overall, Cloudflare’s data suggests that while core Internet usage patterns—search, browsing, and device mix—have stabilized, the security and resilience of the Internet remain under sustained pressure. Governments continue to disrupt connectivity, attackers are launching larger and more frequent campaigns, and email remains a primary delivery mechanism for fraud and compromise.
As organizations plan for 2026, the data underscores a familiar but increasingly urgent reality: availability, performance, and security can no longer be treated as separate concerns.
For a deeper breakdown of these trends including country-level data, interactive charts, and real-time Internet insights, explore Cloudflare’s full 2025 Radar Year in Review here.
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