The Internet is one of, if not, the most omnipresent aspects of modern life. Cloudflare's Year in Review revealed that in 2023 alone there was a 25% increase in global traffic, with no signs of slowing down.
This growth underscores the dependence on Internet services to facilitate and sustain vital systems and tasks, such as supporting global digital economies, enabling the operations of healthcare networks, maintaining business continuity for companies and, ultimately, connecting people to their communities. .
Some of the biggest Internet highlights of 2023 include the following points:
- Most popular Internet service: Google came in first place for the second year in a row, followed by Facebook (No. 2), Apple (No. 3) and TikTok (No. 4).
- Most popular social platform: Facebook came in first place, beating 2022 leader TikTok (#2), followed by Instagram (#3) and Twitter/X (#4).
- Most Popular Generative AI Service: OpenAI took first place in this emerging category, followed by Character AI (#2), Quillbot (#3), and Hugging Face (#4).
- Most targeted sector: Threat actors launch most common attacks against financial organizations around the world.
- Most common cyber threats: Deceptive links and extortion attempts found in malicious email messages were the two most commonly used attack types.
- Observed Internet Outages: There were more than 180 Internet outages worldwide in 2023, compared to more than 150 in 2022, many of them due to regional and national Internet connectivity outages.
This data and conclusions come from the Cloudflare Radar report, a free tool that allows anyone to view global trends and insights on the Internet.
The report is powered by data from Cloudflare's global network and aggregated, anonymized data collected by Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 public DNS service, used as a fast and private way to browse the Internet.
