Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year in Review

Hello everyone. Welcome to another session of Cloudflare TV. My name is Stanley. I am the product manager for Radar and I have a couple fellow Radar team members with me today.

Hello, I'm João Tomé, a storyteller at your service. And you, David? I'm David Belson.

I'm part of the Radar team as well. Awesome. Yeah, today we wanted to talk to you all about the Cloudflare Radar 2022 year in review.

Let's put that up. So we published this blog post in December featuring all of the amazing insights that Cloudflare has accumulated over the last year to put right at your fingertips.

So you can read this blog post in the Cloudflare blog, but we also put together a microsite for you all at reachable at Cloudflare.com slash 2022.

If you go to that page, you'll get dropped here.

And as you'll see, the year in review is a page that has insights broken into traffic, adoption and security.

Within each of those categories, you'll see information on the insights we found for the year.

So for example, our first insight is that worldwide growth in Internet traffic saw a 22% bump, which I think is pretty good coming out of the pandemic.

In addition to that, for each of the sections, we have 195 countries for you to look at, to really drill into insights for each of the countries in addition to worldwide stats.

So for example, Afghanistan instead saw a 30% growth, so more than the average.

But to go through all of the nifty features we've packed into this website, David, how about you walk us through it?

Sure. Sounds good. Let me share my screen. Can you take your sharing down?

All right.

Great.

And this is the first year that I've been involved in producing the Cloudflare year review, but it's the third year overall that we've published one.

So if you go back onto the Cloudflare blog or onto Radar, you can see the ones from the previous years as well.

So as Stanley mentioned, you can go and select countries from the dropdown menu here.

I think one of the interesting ones that I found was Brazil.

So let's select that and take a look at some of the findings there. And as you obviously can go through this on your own and select a country and look at the different metrics that we have, each country has really a different set of findings.

And as you look at the findings for your country or an industry that you're interested in, think about how those insights can inform your marketing programs, your security posture, your developer experience, because we're going to see varying levels of IPv6 adoption or phishing attempts or attack traffic across multiple industries and across multiple locations.

So we've selected Brazil. And so we scroll down here.

So Brazil actually had some fairly strong traffic growth over the course of the year.

And it was pretty steady. It was pretty consistent. So always nice to see a general up and to the right trend.

And again, this is traffic growth as compared to a baseline that was calculated effectively this week last year.

So the second week of January was our baseline for 2022. And we look at traffic growth in comparison to that.

So again, Brazil, you can see traffic growth was up over 50% over the course of the year.

It reached that peak towards the end of November around the same time that the World Cup was going on and that holiday shopping started to kick in.

Just a note, in Brazil, there was in October, during the October 2 days for elections, the first election day was October the 2nd, and the second runoff election day was October the 30th.

So even October was still like also...

Yes, definitely some strong growth there in October. Yeah. Hopefully you can see the mouse over here within the share.

But yeah, it's a good point that the real world events will definitely have an impact on traffic patterns in a given country.

So we look at the... What we're also able to do based on our customer set is stratify or classify the different customers we have by industry.

So for traffic from Brazil, you know, what kind of sites were they going to?

We can look at how that changes over the course of the year. So if we start this animation, one of the things we definitely see is that technology far and away remains the most popular traffic category.

But in sort of the second, fifth place or below technology, you can see some movement going on there with entertainment, society and lifestyle moving around a bunch, business and economy shifting places, gambling and shopping moving around over the course of the year.

And, you know, you see like shopping entertainment... Sorry, excuse me, shopping and auctions and entertainment shifting places towards the end of November around the holiday shopping season as well.

So again, really interesting to see how these categories move and do the changes reflect real world events in a given country.

Next, we have the top 10 popular Internet services. I'm going to actually go past that for the moment.

João is actually going to spend some time walking through that data in a little bit.

We can see bot traffic share. So Cloudflare has the ability to classify inbound traffic as most likely bot or most likely human.

So what we see is the beginning of the year in 2022 was really when the most traffic from Brazil was classified as bot traffic.

So about a third of the bot traffic through January, you can see that that started to drop really in early February and then stayed pretty low, stayed generally around 22, 25 % and then dropped again to the back half of the year.

So this is actually reassuring.

It's nice to see a country where the bot traffic is getting lower over the course of the year.

Hopefully it means that they're practicing better cyber hygiene, that there are fewer botnets in a given country, operating in a given country or things like that.

I have a comment there. I think it's quite interesting that the Internet traffic is increasing in general, is increasing in November.

Shopping, all that. So more humans online in November, but less bots, which is quite interesting in terms of traffic share.

I was going to say, yet another instance of real world events and patterns impacting the data that we see.

Yes, absolutely.

More humans online, more humans driving traffic from a given country drives ultimately that bot percentage down.

I was going to say, one of the things we should add to our to-do list for next year is the ability to overlay these.

So we can say, okay, yeah, traffic is going up, but non-bot traffic is going up, bot traffic is going down.

That's reassuring to see. We had an animation here around the top sources of bot traffic globally.

In this particular case, it's a global view.

Brazil was not one of those top 10 bot sources over the course of the year.

So that's a good thing to see as well. We showed Internet disruptions.

Let me scroll this back here. Internet disruptions that we observed over the course of the year.

And of course, this data is taken from the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center.

I believe we saw one or two disruptions from Brazil, although I don't recall.

So we can let this play through. But this reflects ultimately Internet outages because of things like power outages or infrastructure damage, cable cuts.

It also reflects Internet shutdowns, where more authoritarian governments shut down the Internet generally to prevent communication either within the country in the case of protests or exams or with the outside world, again, in the case of protests.

I really love the slider that people can browse through the year with the slider.

You can see also for that given month how many outages were observed in a given country for that month.

It's like in this case, Sudan.

June is when they historically do exams, secondary school exams.

So there was a period of basically two weeks when they shut down the Internet every day for several hours.

That's reflected here. We looked at an adoption of SpaceX, so we were able to see where is SpaceX traffic coming from.

So again, we saw Brazil had some great growth.

It grew steadily into September, and then there was really an inflection point there in September where it took off.

So obviously, SpaceX Starlink has made their services available in Brazil. We see similar growth in other countries as well.

And Brazil is very specific because it's a big country, and I believe they started putting it available in just one state and then put it in other states.

That's why it increased in the later part of the year.

Yeah, so they may have turned on additional states in the September time frame.

Likely the case. With Mastodon, this has also been in the news lately. Many people are looking at it as sort of an alternative social media platform.

Clearly, it went into the year with an existing user base.

This is all based on data we're gathering from our Cloud One DNS resolver service.

But we can see that there are definitely some peaks in interest in Mastodon during April, and then during again in August, and then sort of October-November time frame.

And in many cases, these align with sort of events in the changing of the hands of Twitter, changing of ownership of Twitter.

So as Musk began to make noise about potentially buying it, as things became more real, you know, apparently there were more folks in Brazil that said, hey, you know, I want to explore alternative platforms like Mastodon.

Actually, in other countries, there are better use cases than Brazil for that.

Yeah, if you have a country in mind that would be interesting to show us.

Germany, UK, any one of those will have like a more late in October and November type of increase.

Yeah, you can see how it is in terms of November for Germany.

And the really interesting thing about Germany in particular is that Mastodon is actually a homegrown solution.

So it's a German, sorry, the Mastodon software is from a German developer.

So it's really interesting to see that. I mean, that there's so much growth here in November, but that there wasn't sort of more, potentially more interest before kind of everything hit the fan.

So jumping back to Brazil, just to close this out.

So we also track IPv6 adoption, really encouraging to see Brazil up over 40% and pretty consistent over the whole year.

I think they're definitely one of the countries with a higher level of IPv6 adoption.

There are a lot of countries that are still below 10%, a lot below 1%. So seeing 44% here is fantastic.

And they were, although interestingly, they were not among the top 10 in IPv6 adoption, which is also interesting.

Now, David, in the interest of time, do you think we could skip to the security section and get an overview for any CIOs that might be watching?

Yeah, absolutely. So looking at mitigated traffic from Brazil, we saw that generally 60 to 70% of that was mitigated as DDoS attacks.

So thinking about your site, your application and the traffic you're seeing from Brazil, the malicious traffic you're seeing is likely going to be either DDoS traffic or it's going to be malicious traffic that can be mitigated by a WAF.

And then if we also think about that as well, for the mitigated traffic we saw from Brazil, by and large, the WAF rule that was most frequently applied was HTTP anomaly.

So this is not one of the more sort of famous, I guess, attack vectors, but it's one where the requests that are being made to a website or application are basically anomalous.

There's headers that are out of order, there's things missing.

So these requests are mitigated as potential attacks. Yeah. And that's probably the easiest way to launch an attack, right?

Is just to mess with the URL.

Potentially, yeah. From a malicious actor perspective. Yeah, potentially.

It depends on the toolkit you're using in many cases. And as we were watching the animation here, you can see that some of the others like SQL injection, cross-site scripting did actually see some growth over the course of the year.

So a lot of that speaks to what kind of attack toolkits are the malicious actors using.

Gotcha. And then just to close it out and hand it off to Joao to talk about the domains, we looked at also for the mitigated traffic that was coming from Brazil, what were the industries that it was targeting?

And what you can see here is that there's a lot of variation.

Overall, sort of you add it all up, technology had sort of the highest percentage.

But on a week-by-week basis, it really seems to be changing.

You've got gambling sites and weather sites and government sites, and everybody seems to be getting hit on by attacks in Brazil.

So with that overview, then I'll hand it back to...

I'll stop sharing and I'll hand it over to Joao to talk about the domains and the rankings that we did there.

Sure. Let me find...

Here it is. Okay, so the domains... Last year, we didn't have the domains in the microsite.

As Stanley said, the domains, the Cloudflare radar year in review this year is quite different.

It has more topics and including the top 10 most popular Internet services.

David already talked about the examples from... And so that's how we have this information.

And what we did in terms of methodology is for the radar page, actually, the domains radar page that can actually show everyone, we did back in September when we created Cloudflare radar 2.0, the new version, this domain's ranking...

It's very specific to having the types of machine learning algorithms for us to have a better understanding, more close...

Not more close to page views that was the case before because DNS period is something difficult to use.

So we try to put better...

That's for this ranking particular. The methodology also tries to show only services that are used by humans.

So those add related things or infrastructure related domains aren't used here.

So it's a more clean and more human type of ranking that we're showing.

The general ranking here shows how Google, with no surprise, was number one.

Also, one thing I think we should mention is that we're not comparing...

And last year, we did only in the blog post, not on the microsite, but we're not comparing this year with the previous year because we changed the methodology.

That's the reason why. But Google was number one, Facebook number two, Apple, TikTok were like tied in number three, and YouTube number five.

Those are like the top five.

We also have a lot of different domains here for people to check.

We didn't include... We have some data in the microsite related to how some of those domains went through here.

It's always number one, no question at all, in many of the days of 2022, that Google was number one.

But for example, TikTok was number three several days that was tied with Apple.

It's quite interesting to see TikTok here.

Last year, with a different methodology, we had TikTok actually number one.

But that's a completely different scenario there. Let's move on to social media.

Were there any surprises here? In terms of this general ranking?

Yeah. As you developed the rankings, calculated the rankings, was there anything here that surprised you?

Mostly the fact that most of the domains in this top 10 category weren't changing a lot.

So last year, there were more changes throughout the top 10.

But I think due to the new methodology we're using. So no breakout stars?

No breakout stars. To be honest, I was kind of surprised that TikTok was still in the top three, at least tied with Apple, because we were curious to see with the new methodology, how TikTok would stand.

And it's still up there, still one of the main ones, which gives also the perspective how TikTok is important, in a sense.

Talking about TikTok, we have a more focus on social media type of category here.

And one of the interesting things is how Twitter, after August, actually before August, Twitter was number three.

And then after August, it was Instagram that took the lead there and became number three in our list.

So there was a shift in those two.

That was the most clear and interesting, I think, throughout the year change.

Because before, Twitter and Instagram were dueling them both for the number three position.

But mostly it was Twitter that was number three. But after August, it was a different matter.

And of course, Twitter was on the news because Elon Musk bought it late October.

So we have that perspective there too. On social media, I see Kuai there at number 10.

That's obviously an international social media site.

It is. Kuai, I think, if I'm not mistaken, is from Asia. Actually, it's from Asia.

I'm not sure if it's from Japan or South Korea. But we have a lot of customers also in Asia.

So some of those social media sites also appear here. Video streaming, also a popular category.

YouTube, we're considering here YouTube too, was definitely number one.

Netflix, the more use case type of paid video streaming service, everybody knows it was definitely number two.

So no doubt there. And then we had Twitch, that is a platform video streaming, online gaming platform, very popular.

Number three, and Roku, that also is hardware, but also it has its original content.

So here it has both things. It also has other players there. But it was number four.

And Disney+, Prime Video, and Hulu, and HBO following. So no interesting trends in terms of big shifts throughout the year there.

But it still shows a perspective in this case.

It reminds me that in the blog post, when we cover the domains, we actually go into a couple of different stories, specifically on some interesting insights that we found on domains, right?

We do. Yeah.

I think it'd be interesting to also highlight that because it's a different view from it is, from what we have.

It is, let me try to find it here. It was further up, I believe.

Yeah. Oh, it is. Yeah. Oh, exactly.

Yeah. So we talked about the top 10, right? Just like we covered on the year in review.

But we cover things like, it looks like you're scrolling to the cryptocurrency services.

Now, this is a good perspective. The FTX was on the news because bankruptcy later in the year.

And you could see when they were bankrupt. So when they filed for bankruptcy, the top 10, for example.

So what that's basically showing is that throughout most of the year, interest in FTX was relatively consistent.

Moved a couple of spaces up and down, but relatively consistent otherwise.

But then people sort of abandoned it in November. True. The interesting thing is there's a jump here in mid-November.

And that jump is when they were just saying that possibly they will be bankrupt.

And then after they were bankrupt, it was when it dropped.

My hunch is that when people started figuring out that they were going to go bankrupt, people went to the site more than usual to try to withdraw.

And then my understanding was the company had shut down withdrawals at a certain point.

And then people started to not visit it as much. Makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. We also have here the perspective of the metaverse and gaming services, where Roblox was definitely number one throughout the year, except for one day actually.

But also a good perspective on Oculus that belongs to meta.

They have their own hardware, but also their own software. And in this case, they are, generally speaking, growing throughout the year in terms of our ranking, which is interesting too.

Going back, for example, just to show the general list for metaverse, one of the most interesting, you could see how it plays out.

Oculus ended the year, tied with Steam, also a big player there.

But here we show the increase throughout the year, which is also a good perspective to have.

Just to end things here, we also have music, audio, and podcasts.

We join Apple Music with iTunes for all sorts of reasons.

One of those is because those two services are intertwined, in a sense.

So because of that, Apple Music is number one, but it's not Apple Music, it's Apple Music and iTunes.

And Spotify is number two.

Also, some interesting things here. Title number nine, for example. We already spoke about financial services.

Here includes crypto. And the only services from crypto that appear in our general financial services category is Binance here.

It's the only one that appears here, at least at this part. PayPal was definitely number one.

We already spoke about the cryptocurrency services. FTX lost its place.

So they were going to be in that top 10, right? But then towards the end of the year, they fell and now they're nowhere to be seen in the ranking.

And we also have the perspective of news organizations, where BBC, the UK-based news organization, and Glovo, the Brazilian one, were tied in number one.

Glovo is like a major player here with all sorts of news organizations inside the group, like BBC, in a sense.

And then CNN and Fox News, interesting enough, are tied number three here.

This is interesting because there's more global representation in this list than I think I've seen in some of the others.

True, absolutely. Because it's good to remind ourselves that, for example, BBC has local sites in Brazil, in Russia, it still has in Russia, in all sorts of countries.

Much local presence is huge.

And Glovo, in this case, they have TV stations, they have newspapers, magazines in Latin America.

More focus, of course, in Brazil. They're from Brazil.

But these are really big players and they appear here, which is interesting.

Yeah, definitely. That's it. In terms of domains, people can browse through some of the categories, but that's it.

Awesome. Well, thanks for that overview of the domains, Rod.

That was super interesting. Just to wrap up, I think that the Year in Review site is super exciting to see how we covered all these countries, there's so many interactive charts.

For anybody that wants a more curated look at the insights that we picked out, looking across all those charts and countries, definitely check out the Year in Review blog post, since those have individual stories of things that we wanted to bring to you guys.

Additionally, feel free to visit radar.Cloudflare.com.

That's where you can see even more charts. It's more of a real-time perspective, I think, on the data that we aggregated across the year for the Year in Review.

Exactly. And in general, we're always on Twitter, so follow us at CloudflareRadar, or just send us your questions or comments at radar.Cloudflare.com.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. It was great. And I think that's a wrap.