Cloudflare Inc News in Quantum Security Shape 2025 Internet
Cloudflare predicts 2025 internet trends: Rising Cyberwarfare, Bot Wars, Quantum Security News from Cloudflare
Cloudflare Inc., the leading connectivity cloud service, presented its sixth annual Year in Review today, providing one of the most comprehensive examinations of traffic, security, and global Internet trends in 2025. The research, based on data from Cloudflare's worldwide network in over 330 cities in 120 countries, highlights a pivotal year online with rapid technological progress and rising risks.
Society relies on the Internet for personal and professional reasons, thanks to technological advances. Worldwide Internet traffic rose 19% last year. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says artificial intelligence and more creative threat actors are “fundamentally rewired” the Internet. Emergence of AI and Bot Wars As AI bot fights intensified this year, Google's crawling bot ruled. Googlebot, which crawls for search indexing and AI training, generated the most automated Internet traffic. More than 28% of Verified Bot traffic in 2025 comes from Googlebot. GoogleBot contributed 4.5% of HTML request traffic, somewhat more than the 4.2% of all AI bots. ChatGPT/OpenAI led Generative AI's rapid growth. Google Gemini, Grok/xAI, and DeepSeek joined the top 10 list, while Perplexity, Claude/Anthropic, and GitHub Copilot rose. From an AI crawling perspective, model training accounts for most traffic. By 2025, user action crawling, in which bots examine websites in response to user enquiries to chatbots, had the lowest volume but the greatest growth, expanding more than 15 times. Due to this surge, site owners often added completely forbidden directives to robots.txt files, making AI crawlers the most restricted user agents. On Cloudflare's Workers AI development platform, text production was the most common activity for Meta's llama-3-8b-instruct model. Security Achievements During Cyber Escalation More than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks arose from the rise in cyberwarfare caused by global traffic. This growth in volumetric attacks redefined online danger "scale". The most targeted vertical was “People and Society”—civil associations, non-profits, and religious institutions—with 4.4% of global reduced traffic. This industry was the first to be attacked, possibly due of its sensitive user data and potential financial value. Post-quantum encryption, which secures 52% of human traffic, arrived quickly, marking a security milestone. Innovative quantum computing poses risks to customers, hence this strategy is necessary. Post-quantum encrypted traffic jumped from 29% to 52% worldwide this year. Apple's mid-September operating system modifications allowed TLS-protected connections to automatically advertise TLS 1.3 quantum-secure key exchange compatibility, accelerating its adoption. Global Quality and Connectivity Leaders Governments caused over half of the 174 significant Internet outages worldwide in 2025. Regional and national shutdowns were used to dissuade academic exam cheating in Iraq, Syria, and Sudan. However, cable-cut outages fell roughly 50%. Europe has the best connectivity, with download rates topping 200 Mbps. Spain had the best Internet quality worldwide with download speeds above 300 Mbps and upload speeds up to 206 Mbps. The UNICO-Broadband initiative, which aspires to build infrastructure with symmetric speeds of at least 300 Mbps, may explain this amazing performance. Starlink's satellite Internet service received more requests from over 20 new countries and regions this year. Mobile requests rose to 43% worldwide, with over half of all request traffic coming from mobile devices in 117 countries and regions. When considering the technology stack of modern web projects, Go-based clients made 20% of automated API calls, up from 12% in 2024, followed by Python at 17%.
