Global internet traffic increased by 25% this year, indicating a growing reliance on online services, according to a recent analysis from Cloudflare, a cloud performance and security business.

Every year, Cloudflare provides an overview of internet developments and security concerns in its Year in Review reports. According to Cloudflare, Google remained the most popular website this year, with Facebook, Apple, and TikTok following closely after. In the social media space, Facebook overtook TikTok as the top in 2022, with Instagram and Twitter/X following closely behind.

OpenAI led the burgeoning field of generative AI services, followed by Character AI, Quillbot, and Hugging Face.

In its annual overview of online trends, Cloudflare reports Google remains the most popular site, while OpenAI takes the lead in generative AI services.

Cyberattacks mostly targeted financial institutions. The most frequent dangers to cybersecurity were extortion attempts in emails and misleading links. Internet disruptions increased significantly from over 150 in 2022 to over 180 events globally, frequently as a result of government-imposed shutdowns.

The most popular device for internet access is a smartphone. As of 2023, more than 40% of people are accessing the Internet using a mobile device, according to data and insight head at Cloudflare David Belson. Of those users, a third use Apple devices. Users seem to be utilizing SpaceX Starlink to access the Internet at a rapid pace in regions where the service is available.

He continued, "We anticipate that there will be a lot of interest in other consumer-facing satellite internet services that become available, like those that Amazon and OneWeb are developing."

Generative AI a standout global trend

In 2023, generative AI gained prominence on a worldwide scale, having first gained notice with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late November 2022. As per the Cloudflare research, OpenAI gained significance at the beginning of the year due to the buzz surrounding it. Other generative AI services gained traction as the year went on. OpenAI, Character.ai, QuillBot, Hugging Face, Poe, Perplexity, Wordtune, Bard, ProWritingAid, and Voicemod were among the more prominent ones.

The study's material comes from Cloudflare Radar, a free tool that gives users access to global Internet trends and insights. The business examined anonymised data from the widely used public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. They employed two primary techniques to compile their lists of internet services. Initially, they combined names that belonged to the same web hosting company. Twitter/X, for instance, contained websites like twitter.com, t.co, and x.com. The business then looked through a long list of domains to see which ones offered services to consumers.

One internet service that had a rough year was Elon Musk's contentious Twitter (now called X). When the war in Ukraine started the year before, the service peaked at number eight, and in 2023 it saw a decline. Compared to 2022, it began the year lower, ranging from 12th to 16th, and at the end of the year, it was between 13th and 19th.

It was observed in 2023 that X/Twitter became more popular on weekends, particularly from April 15 to June 10, when it peaked at position 11 or 12. Prior to May 14, when it was consistently placed 11th, this increase was especially noticeable. From May 14 to June 10, it settled at 12th, in line with important European football events. But following the June 10 European Champions League final, X/Twitter never again reached similar heights.

According to the survey, there is an increasing number of internet disruptions. There were more than 180 internet outages worldwide in 2023 compared to the 150 that were recorded in 2022. Government-directed regional and nationwide shutdowns were the cause of many of these.

For instance, in both the Kurdistan area and the main portion of Iraq, this happened over several days throughout the months of June, July, August, and September, according to Belson. "There were multiple outages caused by cable cuts—both terrestrial and submarine—natural disasters like storms and earthquakes, and power outages, in addition to government-directed Internet shutdowns."

Internet providers were likewise concerned about security. According to Belson, attackers are still making use of the Log4j exploit, which was initially made public in December 2021. The HTTP/2 Rapid Reset vulnerability, which was identified by Cloudflare in October 2023, has also been made public and has been a popular target for threat actors.

He went on, "This new vulnerability has a broad impact and could potentially impact any organization that uses HTTP/2 for their websites and applications."

Ransomware, malware, and phishing assaults are common security threats that impact internet service and disrupt businesses in every way, according to Scott Dowsett, Field CTO at Anomali, a cybersecurity firm.

"As cloud data centers and centralized management become more prevalent, outages are growing, which is made worse by an increase in the number of increasingly complex attacks made possible by artificial intelligence," he continued.