Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.
The impact
Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.
It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.
In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn peers with larger global providers like Telecom Italia (TI) Sparkle, which is one of the owners of SMW5.
In addition to impacting end-user connectivity in the impacted countries, the cable cuts also reportedly impacted cloud providers including Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud. In their incident report, Google Cloud noted“Google Cloud Networking experienced increased packet loss for egress traffic from Google to the Middle East, and elevated latency between our Europe and Asia Regions as a result, for 3 hours and 12 minutes, affecting several related products including Cloud NAT, Hybrid Connectivity and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a capacity shortage following two simultaneous fiber-cuts.” OVHcloud noted that “Backbone links between Marseille and Singapore are currently down” and that “Upon further investigation, our Network OPERATION teams advised that the fault was related to our partner fiber cuts.”
When concurrent disruptions like those highlighted above are observed across multiple countries in one or more geographic areas, the culprit is often a submarine cable that connects the impacted countries to the global Internet. The impact of such cable cuts will vary across countries, largely due to the levels of redundancy that they may have in place. That is, are these countries solely dependent on an impacted cable for global Internet connectivity, or do they have redundant connectivity across other submarine or terrestrial cables? Additionally, the location of the country relative to the cable cut will also impact how connectivity in a given country may be affected. Due to these factors, we didn’t see a similar impact across all of the countries connected to the AAE-1 and SMW5 cables.
What happened?
Specific details are sparse, but as noted above, the cable damage reportedly occurred in Egypt – both of the impacted cables land in Abu Talat and Zafarana, which also serve as landing points for a number of other submarine cables. According to a 2021 article in Middle East Eye, “There are 10 cable landing stations on Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea coastlines, and some 15 terrestrial crossing routes across the country.” Alan Mauldin, research director at telecommunications research firm TeleGeography, notes that routing cables between Europe and the Middle East to India is done via Egypt, because there is the least amount of land to cross. This places the country in a unique position as a choke point for international Internet connectivity, with damage to infrastructure locally impacting the ability of millions of people thousands of miles away to access websites and applications, as well as impacting connectivity for leading cloud platform providers.
As the graphs above show, traffic returned to normal levels within a matter of hours, with tweets from telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Oman also noting that Internet services had returned to their countries. Such rapid repairs to submarine cable infrastructure are unusual, as repair timeframes are often measured in days or weeks, as we saw with the cables damaged by the volcanic eruption in Tonga earlier this year. This is due to the need to locate the fault, send repair ships to the appropriate location, and then retrieve the cable and repair it. Given this, the damage to these cables likely occurred on land, after they came ashore.
Keeping content available
By deploying in data centers close to end users, Cloudflare helps to keep traffic local, which can mitigate the impact of catastrophic events like cable cuts, while improving performance, availability, and security. Being able to deliver content from our network generally requires first retrieving it from an origin, and with end users around the world, Cloudflare needs to be able to reach origins from multiple points around the world at the same time. However, a customer origin may be reachable from some networks but not from others, due to a cable cut or some other network disruption.
In September 2021, Cloudflare announced Orpheus, which provides reachability benefits for customers by finding unreachable paths on the Internet in real time, and guiding traffic away from those paths, ensuring that Cloudflare will always be able to reach an origin no matter what is happening on the Internet.
Conclusion
Because the Internet is an interconnected network of networks, an event such as a cable cut can have a ripple effect across the whole Internet, impacting connectivity for users thousands of miles away from where the incident occurred. Users may be unable to access content or applications, or the content/applications may suffer from reduced performance. Additionally, the providers of those applications may experience problems within their own network infrastructure due to such an event.
For network providers, the impact of such events can be mitigated through the use of multiple upstream providers/peers, and diverse physical paths for critical infrastructure like submarine cables. Cloudflare’s globally deployed network can help content and application providers ensure that their content and applications remain available and performant in the face of network disruptions.
“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” — Queen Elizabeth II birthday speech, April 21, 1947
When Elizabeth II’s reign started, on February 6, 1952 (the coronation was on June 2, 1953), the Turing machine had already been proposed (1936), and with that the basis for computer science. ARPANET, which became the technical foundation of the Internet, was still a dream that came to fruition in the late 60s — the World Wide Web is from 1989 and in 2014 we celebrated its Silver Jubilee. So, with that in mind, let’s answer the question: did the 2022 celebrations of the first British monarch with a 70th anniversary on the throne have an impact on the UK’s Internet traffic?
First, some details about the Platinum Jubilee. There was a four-day bank holiday (June 2-5) in the UK for the celebration that included parades and pageants, and several ceremonies. There was a Big Jubilee Lunch in many communities on Sunday, June 5, and more than 16,000 street parties (pubs and bars were also allowed to stay open for extra two hours). In events like these, not only there’s a lot to do outside, but also to see on the television and that impacts the Internet — we saw it during the Eurovision 2022 final.
Looking at Cloudflare Radar’s data from the UK, we can see that this past weekend clearly had less Internet traffic compared to recent weekends, so people were less online during the daytime, when the Jubilee was being celebrated. Here’s the chart with the previous four weekends of the UK’s Internet traffic:
That lower traffic trend is most clear on Saturday, June 4, at 20:00 local time, when traffic was 23% lower than on the previous Saturday, and on Sunday, June 5, at 15:00, when traffic was 25% lower than on the previous Sunday. The weather was actually sunnier on the previous weekend, May 28-29, but people did seem to have many reasons (related to the Jubilee) to go outside or at least be less online.
Looking at the full picture of when the four-day bank holiday started, Thursday, June 2, 2022, until Sunday, June 5, there’s a clear trend of less traffic through all of those days, which is not unusual, at least for Thursday and Friday, considering that holidays usually have traffic more similar to weekends than weekdays.
No surprise, when there’s a holiday, or it’s the weekend people tend to use their mobile devices more to access the Internet, and that was clearly what we saw in the UK since Thursday, June 2, mobile traffic (green line) was always prevalent compared to desktop traffic (blue line) since then.
On the weekdays before June 2, we can see that Internet traffic by mobile devices only stands out after 18:00 (before that, with people working, desktop took the lead).
From Canada to New Zealand
There are several other commonwealth countries that also had relevant events to celebrate since June 2 and through the past weekend for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Canada is one with several activities throughout the country, including free admission to museums and historic sites, park parties and concerts.
Related to the Jubilee celebrations or not, Internet traffic in Canada was lower this past weekend than in the previous one. Saturday, June 4, at 22:00 in Toronto traffic was 13% lower than in the previous period, and throughout the day that was also the case. On Sunday, traffic was only lower during daytime, especially around 12:00 in Toronto, when it was 15% lower than in the previous Sunday. That was the time of the Jubilee Pageant, in central London (in the next charts, times are in UTC).
Something similar can be seen in terms of lower traffic this weekend in Australia:
And also New Zealand:
Royal family and news websites (Boris Johnson’s no confidence vote included)
Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties. First, we can see that websites concerning the UK Royal family and the Jubilee were clearly seeing more traffic after Wednesday, June 1 (the day before the four-day bank holiday). The three biggest spikes were: Wednesday evening, when traffic was 777% higher at 22:00 (compared to the previous week); the next morning (08:00), when it rose 1060%; and on Saturday evening (21:00) it got 1043% more traffic.
UK-based news websites (TV broadcasters and newspapers) also covered Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee extensively over the extended weekend. And there are three big highlights/spikes from the past few days regarding media outlets’ websites, but only two seem to be related to the Jubilee or the bank holidays.
We can see that the biggest spike in traffic (75% more than the previous period) was the night before the Jubilee four-day bank holiday started. Then, Sunday afternoon when the London Jubilee Pageant was ending, there was another spike (25% higher).
But the day with more sustained traffic from the last 14 days was actually Monday, June 6. That was the day that Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, won a no confidence vote in the UK’s Parliament. There was a clear first spike at around 08:00, when the news that a vote of no confidence would take place on that day broke, and a much bigger one at 21:00 (68% higher), when the final result of the vote was announced.
Social media and messaging trends
Social media trends show a similar pattern to Internet traffic in general, but it’s interesting to see that Thursday, June 2, the first day of the extended weekend, was the one of the full 14 days we’re looking at with less DNS traffic to those platforms.
Messaging, on the other hand, had consistently much lower traffic during the four-day bank holiday, even compared to the previous weekend. Saturday, June 4, was the day with less messaging DNS traffic, at least of the two weeks period we’re observing. At 11:00 Saturday, traffic was 18% lower than in the previous period, the same level of lower DNS requests at 15:00 and through most of the day.
Conclusion: celebrations and events ‘move’ the Internet
When there’s a big country-wide celebration going on, especially one that has a lot of outdoor events and activities, Internet patterns do change. That happens, in this case, for a monarch whose reign began in 1952, when there wasn’t any Internet (it took more than 40 years for the network of networks that can connect us all on Earth to reach its more popular global form).
There’s only one song contest that is more than six decades old and not only presents many new songs (ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Domenico Modugno shined there), but also has a global stage that involves 40 countries — performers represent those countries and the public votes. The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Turin, Italy, had two semi-finals (May 10 and 12) and a final (May 14), all of them with highlights, including Ukraine’s victory. The Internet was impacted in more than one way, from whole countries to the fan and official broadcasters sites, but also video platforms.
On our Eurovision dedicated page, it was possible to see the level of Internet traffic in the 40 participant countries, and we tweeted some highlights during the final.
— Cloudflare Radar (@CloudflareRadar) May 14, 2022
First, some technicalities. The baseline for the values we use in the following charts is the average of the preceding week, except for the more granular minute by minute view that uses the traffic average of May 9 and 10 as baseline. To estimate the traffic to the several types of websites from the 40 participating countries, we use DNS name resolution data. In this blog post, we’re using CEST, Central European Summer Time.
It’s not often that an entertainment event has an impact on a country’s Internet. So, was there an impact on Eurovision nights?
Let’s start with aggregate Internet traffic to the 40 participant countries (Australia included). In the first May 10 semi-final, there seems to be a slight decrease in traffic during the contest — it makes sense if we think that most people were probably watching the broadcast on national TV (and not on YouTube, that was also transmitting live the event). Traffic was lower than in the previous period between 21:00 and 23:00 (the event was between 21:00 to 23:14), but it was back to normal at 23:00.
For the second semi-finalthat trend is less clear. But the May 14 final (that lasted from 21:00 CEST to 01:10) told a different story. Traffic was 6% lower than on the previous Saturday after 21:00, mostly around 22:00, and after 23:15 it was actually higher (between 4% and 6%) than before and continued that way until 02:00.
What happened at that 23:15 time in Eurovision? The last of the 25 songs at the contest was Estonia’s “Hope”, by Stefan, and it ended at 23:14 (also in this blog post we will also see how 23:16 was the highest spike in terms of DNS traffic to fan websites during the final). This is the Internet traffic in the participating countries on May 14 chart:
There were several countries that showed similar impact in terms of traffic change during at least the final. France, UK, Germany, Iceland, Greece and Switzerland are examples.
Eurovision & the UK
The UK was one of the countries where there seems to be more impact during the time of the grand final — last year, according to the ratings, eight million were watching the BBC transmission with the commentator Graham Norton. Traffic started to drop to lower levels than usual at 20:30 (a few minutes before the final) and was 20% lower at 22:00, starting to go closer to normal levels after 23:00, when the set of 25 finalists’ songs came to an end.
Here’s the UK’s Internet traffic trend during the Eurovision May 14 final:
Fan sites: what a difference a winner makes
The most obvious thing to check in terms of impact are the fan websites. Eurovision has many, some general (there’s the OGAE, General Organisation of Eurovision Fans), others more local. And DNS traffic to them was clearly impacted.
The first semi-final, on May 10, had 33x more traffic than in the average of the previous week, with a clear 22:00 CEST spike. But the second semi-final, May 12, topped that, with 42x more traffic at the same time. The final, with the 25 finalists, clearly surpassed that and at 22:00 traffic was already 70x. But because the final was much longer (in the semi-finals it was around 23:00 that the finalists were announced), the peak was reached at 23:00, with 86x more traffic than usual.
“We have a winner. The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 is… Ukraine!”. — Alessandro Cattelan, Laura Pausini and Mika at 01:01 CEST, May 15, 2022.
Saturday’s final was more than four hours long (the semi-finals took little over two hours), and it finished a few minutes after 01:00 CEST. DNS traffic to fan websites dropped from 86x to 45x at midnight, but it went up again to 49x more traffic when it was already 01:00 CEST in most of Europe and Ukraine was announced the winner of Eurovision 2022. This next chart shows Saturday’s May 14 final traffic change to fan sites:
We can also clearly see that on Sunday morning, at 09:00, there was a 20x peak to fan sites, and also at 11:00 (17%).
Now, let’s go deeper by looking at a minute by minute view (the previous charts show hourly data) of DNS traffic to fan sites. In the two semi-finals it’s easy to see that the moment the finalists were announced, and the event was ending, around 23:12, was when traffic was higher. Here’s what the May 10 (yellow) and May 12 (green) two semi-finals fan sites growth looked like:
We can also spot some highlights in fan sites during the semi-final besides the finalists’ announcement, which we saw were definitely the most popular moments of the two nights. First, on May 10 there was more traffic before the event (21:00) than on May 12, so people seem to have greater expectations of the first Eurovision 2022 event of the week. In terms of spikes (before the winners’ announcements), we created a list of moments in time with more interest to the fan websites and connected them to the events that were taking place at that time in Eurovision (ordered by impact):
First semi-final, May 10 #1. 22:47 Sum up of all the songs. #2. 22:25 Norway’s song (Subwoolfer, “Give That Wolf a Banana”). #3. 21:42 Bulgaria’s song (Intelligent Music Project, “Intention”). #4. 21:51 Moldova’s song (Zdob și Zdub and Advahov Brothers, “Trenulețul”). #5. 22:20 Greece’s song (Amanda Georgiadi Tenfjord, “Die Together”).
Second semi-final, May 12 #1. 21:22 Between Serbia (Konstrakta, “In corpore sano”) and Azerbaijan (Nadir Rustamli, “Fade to Black”). #2. 22:48 Voting period starts. #3. 22:30 Czech Republic’s song (We Are Domi, “Lights Off”). #4. 22:38 Laura Pausini & Mika performing (“Fragile” Sting cover song). #5. 22:21 Belgium’s song (Jérémie Makiese, “Miss You”).
How about the May 14 final? This chart (followed by a ranking list) shows DNS traffic spikes in fan sites on Saturday’s final:
Final, May 14 #1. 23:11 Between Serbia (Konstrakta, “In corpore sano”) and Estonia (Stefan, “Hope”). #2. 23:33 Sum up of all the songs. #3. 23:57 Voting ended. #4. 23:19 Sum up of all the songs. #5. 23:01 Ending of the United Kingdom’s song (Sam Ryder, “Space Man”).
— BBC Eurovision🇬🇧 | 👩🚀#teamSPACEMAN (@bbceurovision) May 15, 2022
(UK’s performer and representative Sam Ryder with Graham Norton, the BBC commentator of Eurovision since 2009 — the BBC broadcasts the event since 1956.)
The broadcasters show
How about official national broadcaster websites? Around 23:00 CEST traffic to the aggregate of 40 broadcasters was generally higher on the semi-finals and final nights (represented in grey on the next chart). That’s more clear on the final at 23:00, when DNS traffic was 18% higher than in the previous Saturday (and 50% compared to the previous day). During the semi-finals the difference is more subtle, but at 23:00 traffic in both May 10 and 12 traffic was ~6% higher than in previous days.
When we focus on the minute by minute view also on the broadcaster sites but on the three Eurovision evenings, the highest growth in traffic is also during the final (like we saw in the fan sites), mainly after 23:00, which seems normal, considering that the final was much longer in time than the semi-finals that ended around that time.
During the final (represented in pink in the previous chart), there were some clear spikes. We’ve added them to a ranking that also shows what was happening in the event at that time.
Broadcaster site spikes. Final, May 14 #1. 21:52 Best moments clip of the two semi-finals #2. 21:00 Contest starts #3. 00:24 Sam Ryder, the UK representative (with the song “Space Man”) being interviewed after reaching the #1 in the voting process. #4. 01:09 Ukraine’s (Kalush Orchestra, “Stefania”) performance as the winner #5. 01:02 Ukraine was announced as the Eurovision 2022 winner.
Video platforms: the post-final growth
Eurovision uses video platforms like YouTube and TikTok to share all the songs, clips of the events and performers and there was also a live transmission on YouTube of the three nights. Given that, we looked at DNS traffic to the video platforms in an aggregate for the 40 participating countries. So, was there an impact to this well known and high performing social and video platforms? The short answer is: yes.
The final was also the most evident example, especially after 23:15, when all the 25 finalists songs already performed and the event had two more hours of non-participant performances, video clips that summarize the songs and the voting process — the famous moment in Europe to find out who will get from each of the 40 participant countries the maximum of 12 points.
In this comparison between the semi-finals and final day, we can see how on May 10, the day of the first semi-final, video platform traffic had more growth before the contest started, which is not that surprising given that it was the first Eurovision 2022 event and there was perhaps curiosity to check who were the other contestants (by then Eurovision had videos of them all on YouTube).
But the May 14 final shows more DNS traffic growth than the other Eurovision days after 23:16 (as we saw before, that was the time when all the finalists’ songs had already been performed). The difference in traffic compared to the semi-finals was higher at 1:11 CEST. That was the moment that the final came to an end on Saturday night, and at that time it reached 31% more traffic to video platforms than on May 10, and 38% than on May 12.
Australia’s impact (with an eight hours difference)
Australia was one of the 40 participants, and it had a major time difference (there’s an eight-hour difference to CEST). Continuing to look at video platforms, DNS traffic in Australia was 22% higher at 23:00 CEST (07:00 local time) than it was in the previous Saturday and continued high around 17% of increase a few hours after. Before the 23:00 peak, traffic was 20% higher at 22:00 and 17% at 21:00, when the event was beginning.
The winners & social media
Social media in general in the 40 participating countries wasn’t as impacted, but there was a 01:00 CEST spike during the final at around the time the decision to choose the winner was between Ukraine and the UK — at 01:01 Ukraine was announced the winner of Eurovision 2022.
We can also see an impact on social media in Ukraine, when Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” song was announced the winner at Saturday’s, May 14, final (it was already after midnight, May 15). The usual traffic slowing down night trend that is seen in other days was clearly interrupted after 01:02 CEST (02:02 local time in Ukraine).
Conclusion: the Eurovision effect
When an event like Eurovision happens, there are different patterns on the Internet in the participating countries, usually all in Europe (although this year Australia was also there). Fan and broadcaster websites have specific impact because of the event, but in such a multimedia event, there are also some changes in video platforms’ DNS traffic.
And that trend goes as far as the Internet traffic of the participating countries at a more general level, something that seems to indicate that people, at least for some parts of Eurovision and in some countries, were more focused on their national TV broadcast.
What happens to the Internet traffic in countries where many observe Ramadan? Depending on the country, there are clear shifts and changing patterns in Internet use, particularly before dawn and after sunset.
This year, Ramadan started on April 2, and it continued until May 1, 2022, (dates vary and are dependent on the appearance of the crescent moon). For Muslims, it is a period of introspection, communal prayer and also of fasting every day from dawn to sunset. That means that people only eat at night (Iftar is the first meal after sunset that breaks the fast and often also a family or community event), and also before sunrise (Suhur).
In some countries, the impact is so big that we can see in our Internet traffic charts when the sun sets. Sunrise is more difficult to check in the charts, but in the countries more impacted, people wake up much earlier than usual and were using the Internet in the early morning because of that.
Cloudflare Radar data shows that Internet traffic was impacted in several countries by Ramadan, with a clear increase in traffic before sunrise, and a bigger than usual decrease after sunset. All times in this blog post are local. The data in the charts is bucketed into hours. So, for example, when we show an increase in traffic at 0400 we are showing that an increase occurred between 0400 and 0459 local time.
Indonesia is a clear example of that, showing trends that continued until the end of Ramadan:
In the next table, we show a country ranking by order of impact. Here, we include traffic changes before dawn and after sunset. In the last column, you can also see the change in traffic after Ramadan ended, right after sunset. In this case, we’re looking at Wednesday, May 4, right after the Eid al-fitr — the May 2-3, 2022 holiday of breaking the fast, in a comparison with the previous Wednesday at the same time (when Ramadan was ongoing):
Internet traffic: Ramadan’s impact
Before sunrise
After sunset
Post-Ramadan, May 4 (after sunset)
Afghanistan
+203%
-28%
+20%
Pakistan
+119%
-39%
+13%
Indonesia
+98%
-13%
–
Morocco
+90%
-36%
+44%
Libya
+81%
-27%
+48%
Turkey
+78%
-19%
+22%
Bangladesh
+62%
-40%
+12%
Saudi Arabia
+55%
-45%
-5%
United Arab Emirates
+52%
-13%
+4%
Bahrain
+44%
-31%
+21%
Malaysia
+41%
-8%
-9%
Qatar
+35%
-23%
+5%
Egypt
+31%
-32%
+56%
Tunisia
+25%
-43%
+101%
Iran
+24%
+10%
-12%
Singapore
+8%
-5%
+4%
India
–
-15%
–
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Libya and Turkey had the biggest impact in an increase in traffic before sunrise. After sunset, it was (by order of impact) Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Pakistan that showed a more clear decrease in traffic after sunset.
Here’s the impact of the start of Ramadan on Bangladesh, with more highlights inside the next chart:
Waking up earlier
There’s a clear pattern in most of the countries, Internet traffic was much higher than usual between 04:00 to 04:59 local time (where usually it’s the time with the lowest traffic).
The same early spike is seen in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. In the case of the United Arab Emirates, the time before sunrise for the Suhur meal had more mobile usage than usual (so people were using their mobile devices to access the Internet more than usual at that time).
That’s also the case for Pakistan, where traffic is 119% higher on the 04:00 to 04:59 hour on April 3, than on the previous Sunday, but also in Qatar (sunrise at 05:25 and a spike of 35%) or Afghanistan. In the latter, the spike is 203% higher:
We also saw the same trend in Indonesia, sunrise was at 05:55 local time at the beginning of April, and there’s a clear spike in traffic in the 04:00 to 04:59 hour with a 98% growth in requests.
Northern African countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco or Libya (sunrise at 06:54), show the same 04:00 to 04:59 hour spike. In Libya, traffic was 81% higher on Sunday, April 3, than it was the previous Sunday at the same time. Usually, the 04:00 to 04:59 hour is the lowest point in traffic in the country, but on April 3 and the following days it was at 08:00.
Saudi Arabia shows a similar pattern in terms of Internet traffic on Sunday, April 3, 2022, sunrise was at 05:44, and there was 55% more Internet use than at the same time on the previous Sunday, before Ramadan.
Does daily total Internet traffic go up or down?
The short answer is: depends on the country, given that there are examples of a general increase and decrease in traffic in the most impacted countries. We see similar trends for the sunset and sunrise times of day, but it’s a different story throughout the 30 days of Ramadan.
Iran, in general, shows an increase in traffic after Ramadan started on April 2, and a decrease after it ended on May 3 (of around 15%).
Something similar is seen in Pakistan, that had a general decrease in traffic the week after Ramadan ended, but during the 18:00 to 18:59 hour, May 4, had 13% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Wednesday, when Ramadan was being observed and the iftar meal would have happened during the 18:00 to 18:59 hour.
The opposite happens in Libya, where traffic, generally speaking, declined during Ramadan and picked up after — comparing Wednesday, May 4, 2022, with the previous one during the 19:00 to 19:59 hour, traffic grew around 48%. The same trend is seen in another North African country: Morocco (growth of 44% after Ramadan ended).
After Ramadan, sunsets ‘bring’ more Internet traffic
Another pattern, unsurprisingly, that our chart at the beginning of this blog post shows is how the sunset period changes when Ramadan (and the holiday that follows) ends, in most cases clearly increasing traffic at around 18:00 or 19:00.
Of the 16 countries with a bigger Ramadan impact, only four had a decrease in traffic after sunset on May 4: Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. All of these countries had an increase (or sustained traffic) in daily traffic during Ramadan and lost daily Internet usage after it ended (in May).
Here’s the example of Indonesia through the Ramadan period that includes April and May:
And a zoomed-in Indonesia chart after Ramadan ended (May 1, but bear in mind that May 2-3 is the holiday Eid al-fitr) that shows not only the general decrease in traffic, but also how the sunset period doesn’t have a clear drop in requests as seen in the Ramadan period:
Conclusion: a human impact
Ramadan has a clear impact on Internet traffic patterns as humans change their habits.
The Internet may be the network of networks, where there are many bots (friendly and less friendly), but it continues to be a human-powered network, made by humans for humans.
“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” — Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 1789
The famous expression highlighting that only “death and taxes” seem certain in life (something that goes back to the beginning of civilization and to Ancient Egypt) is on people’s minds during the month of April in the United States. This past Monday, April 18, 2022, was Tax Day. So, were US citizens procrastinators, leaving their federal (and state) tax returns to the last day? Traffic to tax-related official federal and state websites seems to show it: there was a spike of more than 470% on April 18.
Just for reference, we can see on Cloudflare Radar that Internet traffic in the US, from our perspective, wasn’t significantly impacted on Monday, April 18, although there was a clear peak, higher than in the previous 14 days, that night at 22:00 EST (that’s 02:00 UTC on April 19). So, traffic (that includes DNS and HTTP requests from our standpoint) was 18% higher compared to the same time on the previous Monday.
For the following charts, Cloudflare Radar uses a variety of sources to provide aggregate information about Internet traffic and attack trends. In this blog post, we will use DNS name resolution data as a proxy for traffic to Internet services, as we did for Super Bowl LVI or for the Oscars 2022.
In this case, the baseline value for the charts (that we use to get the percent growth) was calculated by taking the mean DNS traffic level for the associated Internet services on March 31 — a typical day before from the April 18 deadline. On these charts, we are using the EST timezone.
Let’s start with an aggregate of all the federal and state level official tax-related sites. This Monday, DNS requests jumped at 13:00 EST to 472% more than usual (the average on March 31 for all the 51 sites we’re checking is the baseline here). That’s 203% more than the previous highest growth day in April.
Here are the top five days in April ranked by traffic increase:
US federal and state official tax sites peaks in requests
Monday, April 18 (Tax Day 2022), 13:00 — 472% growth.
Thursday, April 14, 15:00 — 269%.
Friday, April 15, 15:00 — 264%.
Monday, April 11, 13:00 — 252%.
Wednesday, April 13, 14:00 — 251%.
Taxes on weekdays
Another trend in the previous chart is that people seem to use more weekdays in April than the weekends to submit their taxes (or to visit official tax-related sites). That’s a trend we see not only for federal sites, but also for the state ones (even more in the latter).
State official tax sites also have a bigger growth in requests in April, from our perspective, than federal, but the general growth is very clear right from the beginning of April, with a relevant peak going up to 221% of increase in traffic at 13:00 EST on April 4.
Another more specific trend regarding Tax Day 2022 was that traffic was higher than before any other day in April right around 09:00 (with 293% increase) and it continued that way until 20:00.
Tax services with a growth up to 680%
In the taxes filling realm there are also many services, some smaller and local, others national and well known, that help people to do the inevitable business of dealing with sales, income, property, license or other taxes.
The peak was reached on Monday, April 18, at 19:00 EST with a growth in requests of 680%. It was a busy afternoon and evening across the US for tax services.
And here’s the top five ranking of traffic growth for tax services sites in April:
US tax services sites peaks in requests
Monday, April 18 (Tax Day 2022), 19:00 — 680% growth
Sunday, April 17, 20:00 — 439%
Friday, April 15, 12:00 — 328%
Saturday, April 16, 14:00 — 326%
Sunday, April 10, 15:00 — 311%
For these types of sites, there are more spikes of traffic on the weekends than on weekdays and that started right at the beginning of April, with Sunday, April 3, reaching 295% in growth, not that far from the peaks on the days prior to Tax Day 2022.
We can also see in a more detailed view in the next chart that at 10:00 on Tax Day 2022 requests growth were already at an all month high with more than 478% of increase. The sustained growth was maintained throughout the day and only after 22:00 (474%) did it drop lower than in previous days.
Conclusion
No surprise, people are aware of the deadlines for their tax returns, and many do leave it to the last day and that is very clear looking at the trends related to tax sites.
If you’re curious about these types of trends, check Cloudflare Radar for up-to-date insights about all the countries on Earth.
The first round of the 2022 French presidential elections were held this past Sunday, April 10, 2022, and a run-off will be held on April 24 between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Looking at Internet trends in France for Sunday, it appears that when people were voting Internet traffic went down, and, no surprise, it went back up when results are coming in — that includes major spikes to news and election-related websites.
Cloudflare Radar data shows that Sundays are usually high-traffic days in France. But this Sunday looked a little different.
The seven-day Radar chart shows that there was a decrease in traffic compared to the previous Sunday between 08:00 and 16:00 UTC, that’s 10:00 and 18:00 in local time — bear in mind that polling stations in France were open between 08:00 and 19:00 (or 20:00 in big cities) local time. So, the decrease in traffic was ‘inside’ the period when French citizens were allowed to vote.
That’s a similar trend we have seen in other elections, like the Portuguese one back in January 2022.
The time of the French election day with the largest difference compared to the previous Sunday was 14:00 UTC (16:00 in local time), when traffic decreased as much as 16% (as the previous 7-day chart shows). That’s clear in this chart:
That doesn’t show us precisely how people use the Internet differently on an election day — note that we already saw in the past how the weather, times of the year or even events affect human behaviour and subsequently Internet trends.
Let’s look deeper into those trends. We know that weekdays, weekends and even Sundays have, in many countries, specific patterns so, when we compare the previous four Sundays in France since March 20, we can see some trends highlighted in the next chart:
April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the most traffic of the previous month at 06:30 UTC (08:30 local time) and in several periods between 16:30 and 20:45 UTC (18:30 and 22:45 local time).
April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the least traffic of the previous month in several periods between 09:45 and 11:15 (11:45 and 13:15 local time) and it was the #3 out of #4 with less traffic between 12:15 and 16:15 (14:15 and 18:15 local time).
This seems to show patterns such as: before going to vote more people than usual were online on Sunday, Election Day (08:30 local time), but traffic went down considerably in the late morning period between (11:30-13:15) and again after lunch (14:15 and 18:15) shortly before the polling stations were closed.
The first exit polls started to be published around 18:40 local time (seen in the second and biggest green circle in the previous chart), but the main exit poll was at 20:00 local time, when all the polling stations were already closed, at that time Internet traffic in France was at its highest compared to Sundays during the past 30 days (seen in the third green circle in the previous chart, 18:00 UTC).
How about mobile devices’ usage trends? People in France were definitely using their mobile devices more on Election Day, and that is also evident when compared to the previous Sunday, April 3.
On Election Day, April 10, 2022, at around 09:00 local time mobile usage represented 60% of Internet traffic and had another spike at 21:00 local time with 58% (the seven-day average for mobile usage in France is 48%).
When results arrive, people go online
Official websites usually aren’t the most popular sites in a given country, their popularity is mostly connected to when citizens have to fill in their tax forms online or want to see something like election results — although news media outlets are also important there. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.
Official French election-related websites like elections.interieur.gouv.fr (where the results are published) had an increase in traffic throughout the week mainly after Monday, April 4, but on election day there were two major spikes.
The first spike in traffic was around 20:00 local time (370% more than the previous Sunday at the same time), when all the polling stations were already closed and the first major polls were revealed. But the main spike was later, at midnight (local time), when 84% of the votes were already counted and published — Macron was leading (27%) followed closely by Le Pen (25%). That spike represented 925% more requests than in the previous Sunday.
The news Internet traffic spike ‘knocks’ at 20:00
When there are elections in a country, people tend to see the analysis and results using media outlets from radio to TV, but also the Internet — media websites and social media. Let’s focus on French media outlets. The biggest spike of the week in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on Election Day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday.
Nonetheless, after 16:00 local time, traffic started to increase to those news outlets and by 18:00 local time it had its largest spike of the week with sustained growth until 20:00. At 23:00 local time there was another increase in traffic and after that it started to decrease. But, this Monday morning, traffic at 08:00 was already higher again than during the previous week (Election Day excluded). So, no surprise, Sunday night was when people were looking more into the news.
The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with an even more isolated spike at 20:00 local time and a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced.
This was also similar to the broadcast radio website trends. Besides the 20:00 local time spike (272% increase compared to the previous Sunday), there was also a big one at 23:00 local time (300%) and a Monday morning spike with higher than before traffic (82% increase):
How about social media?
Regarding social media in France (looking at the aggregate DNS of the several sites), there’s no clear trend regarding the elections, but there were slightly fewer requests than on the previous Sunday. So social media doesn’t appear to have been as impacted by the elections as news websites.
Conclusion
Although there aren’t big changes in Internet traffic, like those seen in countries that shut down the Internet during election periods, Election Day seems to influence human and Internet patterns, in this case when results started to pour in on election night people went to news or official election websites.
Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. In many cases, these disruptions can be attributed to a physical event, while in other cases, they are due to an intentional government-directed shutdown. In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause.
Plate tectonics
Internet outages caused by “earth movers” are more frequently caused by errant backhoes. However, two Internet disruptions in the first quarter were caused by more significant earth movement — a volcanic eruption and an earthquake.
The first impacted connectivity on the island nation of Tonga, when the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption damaged the submarine cable connecting Tonga to Fiji, resulting in a 38 day Internet outage. After the January 14 eruption, only minimal Internet traffic (via satellite services) was seen from Tonga. On February 22, Digicel announced that the main island was back online after initial submarine cable repairs were completed – the immediate return of traffic is clearly visible in the figure below. However, it was estimated that repairs to the domestic cable, connecting outlying islands, could take an additional six to nine months.
The second disruption, caused by a 7.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of central Japan on March 16, was significantly shorter, and had a significantly smaller impact. The earthquake occurred around 1436 UTC, causing power outages that resulted in a loss of Internet connectivity in cities including Tokyo for several hours, as seen in the figure below. Almost exactly 11 years prior, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake also had a nominal impact on Internet connectivity in Japan, that time apparently due to damage to subsea cable systems.
Infrastructure damage
Internet resilience is, of course, heavily dependent on the resilience of the underlying physical infrastructure, including data centers, terrestrial fiber, and submarine cables. Damage to this infrastructure often disrupts Internet connectivity.
Early in the morning of January 5, the Gambia was completely isolated from the global Internet. As evident in the figure below, the incident lasted over eight hours, between 0117 and 0945 UTC. According to a press release from GAMTEL, after the failure of the primary link (damage to the ACE submarine cable), traffic was routed onto two backup links through Senegal. However, these backup links also failed because they converged in a location that was ultimately identified as a single point of failure.
Around 2130 UTC on January 20, Internet traffic to Yemen dropped to near zero, as shown in the figure below, after ongoing airstrikes reportedly hit a telecommunications building in Al-Hudaydah where the FALCON undersea cable lands. The outage lasted four days, finally recovering around 2100 on January 24. The outage primarily affected YemenNet (Public Telecommunication Corporation), the state-owned telecommunications provider.
According to a published report, one of the cuts was on the Victorian (mainland) end, and the other on the Tasmanian side, with both cuts caused by “third parties”. A significant reduction in traffic between 0130 – 0800 UTC is visible in the figure below.
On March 15, ETECSA, the Cuban state telecommunications company, reported that a fiber optic cable had been cut on a public road in the capital that morning. The impact of this fiber cut on Internet traffic to Cuba and ETECSA is visible in the figures below, starting just after 1200 UTC, lasting for over six hours.
Although initially believed to be the result of a power outage (all too common in Venezuela), a March 24 Internet disruption in the country was ultimately due to a fiber cut. Internet traffic to CANTV customers in multiple Venezuelan states dropped significantly between 1140 and 1740 UTC, as seen in the figure below. In addition to this disruption, VE sin Filtro reported a number of additional multi-hour, multi-state Internet disruptions in Venezuela during the first quarter.
On March 31, Internet traffic to Telenor Pakistan dropped 60% between 0600-0745 UTC, as shown in the figure below. According to Telenor Pakistan responses to hundreds of customer complaints lodged via Twitter, the disruption was due to multiple fiber-optic cable cuts in several locations. Just after 1800 UTC, Telenor Pakistan Tweeted that services had been fully restored.
Power outages
In addition to the physical infrastructure, reliable electrical power is also critical for resilient Internet connectivity. At a provider level, loss of power can take key data centers and routers offline, impacting connectivity for customers and other connected networks. Consumer power outages can take home/business routers and connected devices offline, forcing users onto mobile connectivity, assuming that is/remains available.
The interconnected electrical grids of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan all suffered outages on January 24 after Kazakhstan’s North-South power line was disconnected due to “emergency imbalances”. These power outages caused multi-hour Internet disruptions across all three countries starting around 0600 UTC, as the figures below show. The impact to traffic in Kazakhstan appeared to be fairly minor, while traffic declined significantly in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and took longer to recover.
A power outage across multiple counties and cities in Taiwan starting around 0100 UTC on March 3 caused a brief #Internet disruption. The figure below shows a nominal initial drop in traffic, though traffic remained lower throughout the next several hours. The power outage was reportedly caused by human negligence during annual repairs of a generator at the Hsinta power plant.
In addition to the fiber cut discussed above, Cuba’s Internet suffered a second disruption on March 24. A Tweet from ETECSA stated that a power failure had caused a disruption to voice service, SMS, and mobile data. Analysis of Internet traffic for both Cuba and ETECSA finds that the disruption started around 1230 UTC, and lasted for approximately 90 minutes, as shown in the figures below.
DDoS attack
Although distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks often target web or application servers in an attempt to knock a given website or application offline, such attacks that target network infrastructure can have more widespread impact, not only restricting access to sites and applications hosted within that network, but also disrupting connectivity for users attached to the network.
Such a DDoS attack targeted AS8867 (E-Gov – Tehila Project) in Israel on March 14. The figure below shows that Internet traffic to that ASN began to decline just before 1530 UTC. A published report notes that the websites of the interior, health, justice and welfare ministries, as well as that of the Prime Minister’s office, were all taken offline as a result of the attack.
Unspecified technical causes
As discussed above, the underlying technical or physical causes of Internet disruptions are often easily identified, frequently thanks to social media or other communications from the impacted network providers. However, sometimes disruptions are observed that are correlated with a real-world (often political) event with no specified technical or physical cause, while other times disruptions are observed but are both uncorrelated and unattributed.
In Kazakhstan, an Internet disruption began on January 5 amid mass protests against sudden increases in energy prices. Starting around 1030 UTC, traffic from Kazakhstan dropped to near zero. The figure below shows that traffic returned to a regular diurnal pattern on January 11, but several apparent restorations of connectivity are also visible during the six-day disruption. These brief periods of connectivity appeared to align with televised speeches or announcements from the Zazakh president.
In Burkina Faso, heavy gunfire related to an army mutiny was reported early in the morning of January 23. A significant drop in traffic from the country was observed in Cloudflare Radar starting around 0915 UTC, with Orange, FasoNet, and Telecel Faso all seeing lower traffic volumes. As the figure below shows, the disruption lasted for nearly a day and a half, recovering around 2000 UTC on January 24.
Just after 2200 UTC on March 15, Yemen experienced a significant, albeit brief, Internet disruption, lasting just 30 minutes. As the figures below show, the disruption was primarily due to an issue at YemenNet. A published report claims that the disruption was due to a deliberate act by the Houthi coup militia.
Russian invasion of Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now been going on for over a month. In some cases, Internet connectivity has been collateral damage from the kinetic military action, while in other cases, targeted attacks on network providers and power outages have disrupted connectivity. Technicians from Ukrainian service providers have been risking their lives to keep the country online, and have been largely successful – Cloudflare Radar traffic data for Ukraine shows that as of the end of March, peak traffic levels are at 85-90% of pre-invasion peaks. An earlier blog post provides additional details about Internet traffic patterns observed in Ukraine during the first week after the conflict began.
Below we highlight just a few significant disruptions observed on major Ukrainian network providers in March.
Two brief outages were observed at Ukrtelecom during the second week of March, shown in the figure below. The first, on March 8, lasted for just over two hours, while the second one, on March 10, lasted for approximately 40 minutes. No root cause has been reported for these disruptions.
Later in the month, on March 28, Ukrtelecom experienced a ~15 hour outage, lasting from 0800 UTC to approximately 0100 on March 29, as seen in the figure below. A Twitter thread from the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine explained that the outage was caused by “a powerful cyberattack” against Ukrtelecom’s infrastructure, and that “In order to preserve its network infrastructure and to continue providing services to Ukraine’s Armed Forces and other military formations as well as to the customers, Ukrtelecom has temporarily limited providing its services to the majority of private users and business-clients.” A LinkedIn post from Ukrtelecom also highlights the non-stop work that the company has been doing to re-establish telecommunications services in impacted regions across the country.
The figure below shows that around 2100 UTC on March 9, Ukrainian Internet service provider Triolan suffered a significant disruption, reportedly resulting from a cyber attack. Traffic began to gradually return after approximately 10 hours.
Conclusion
Despite occasional connectivity disruptions, the Internet remains remarkably resilient. This resiliency is increasingly critical as the Internet finds its way into more and more areas of everyday life around the world. In addition to providing a suite of solutions that support that resiliency, we use the data exhaust from these solutions to monitor Internet reliability, availability, security, and performance.
Follow @CloudflareRadar on Twitter for updates on Internet disruptions as they occur, and find up-to-date information on Internet trends using Cloudflare Radar.
The 94th Academy Awards happened this past Sunday, March 27, 2022. In the global event we got to see several Oscars attributed to winners like CODA, Jane Campion (the director of The Power of the Dog) and also Dune (which won six Oscars), but also moments that had a clear impact in the Internet traffic, like the altercation on stage between Will Smith and Chris Rock.
Cloudflare Radar uses a variety of sources to provide aggregate information about Internet traffic and attack trends. In this blog post, we will use DNS name resolution data as a proxy for traffic to Internet services, as we did for the Super Bowl LVI.
The baseline value for the charts (that are only focused on the US) was calculated by taking the mean DNS traffic level for the associated Internet services between 08:00 – 12:00 PST on Sunday (March 27, 2022) — usually we use UTC, but we chose to use Los Angeles time as that’s where the event took place.
The event started with Beyoncé singing at 17:00 PST and ended at around 20:30. In terms of growth in traffic, the start of the show didn’t show much for social media, although TikTok and Twitter started to decrease in DNS requests after that time.
Will Smith makes Twitter and TikTok rise in requests
Twitter and TikTok were the social networks that seemed most impacted by the moment Will Smith went on stage and started an altercation with Chris Rock after a joke.
For Twitter, the major change in DNS requests was exactly after that incident (at 19:25); before that, at 18:00, the moment Sebastián Yatra performed Encanto’s Dos Oruguitas song also had a small spike.
There were 32% more DNS requests for Twitter a few minutes after the altercation, and that growth peaked at 20:15 with 51% more requests than there were at 19:20 — that was after Will Smith (20:05) gave his acceptance and apology speech, when he was awarded the Best Actor Oscar. The ceremony ended at 20:30, and after that traffic went down.
TikTok also seemed to be used during the ceremony and the breaks, and after a spike during one of the commercial breaks, around 18:40, after Troy Kotsur won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in CODA.
The Will Smith incident seems to be associated with an increase of 20% in requests from 19:20 to 19:30. The trend continued with a 25% increase (19:40) and a peak of 40% more traffic at 20:15, right after Will Smith’s speech. After the ceremony ended (20:30), traffic went down.
Facebook (yellow line) and Instagram (green) weren’t particularly impacted, although there’s a decrease in traffic after the ceremony started and requests start to decrease after 19:00, especially Facebook.
Actresses made IMDb.com tick
One of the main sources of information about the movie industry is IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database, and traffic to the site was impacted by the Oscars in a way not related to the Will Smith incident. Requests almost doubled (93% increase) in the minutes before the Oscars started (between 16:50 and 17:00).
And there was another clear spike right after Ariana DeBose won (at 17:23) the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for West Side Story, with almost 90% growth in traffic compared to the previous 10 minutes.
There is also an increase at 19:00, when Kenneth Branagh won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for writing Belfast. The other major spike in traffic, with 55% increase compared to the previous minutes, was right around the time Jessica Chastain got the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in the movie The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
ABC and Oscars.com trends
ABC was the official broadcaster for the 2022 Oscars, and throughout the event had good numbers: two hours before the ceremony, ABC.com and also their dedicated page Oscars.com (that redirects to abc.com/shows/oscars) had between 200 to 600% more traffic than in our baseline (the morning period, 08:00 – 12:00 PST).
The biggest spike was around 19:45, a few minutes after the Will Smith incident. This was around the time Questlove received the Best Documentary Oscar for Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), and there was a reunion for The Godfather, with Francis Ford Coppola and actors Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, on stage.
Oscars official website
The official Oscars.org website also had some trends worth mentioning. Requests to the site increased 400% in the hour before the ceremony started, from 16:00 to 17:00, and remained high after that.
But at 19:45 there was a clearer spike in traffic of around 1,300% increase compared to the previous 10 minutes — that was 20 minutes after the Will Smith incident, right after Questlove’s Oscar and at the time of The Godfather reunion. There was another spike right after the Best Actress award and before the event ended. The full list of winners was published on Oscars.org right after 20:30.
Movie news sites trends
So, how about the trends for movie news sites like Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Vulture or E Online? For this we went on to look at the whole Oscars week (the baseline is a mean of the previous Sunday, March 20, 2022). The Oscars Sunday, March 27, was definitely the main day of the week, with DNS requests for those websites growing 833% more than the best days of the week.
That growth was even higher the next day, Monday, March 28, 2022, when traffic rose to 1,200% more than the best days of the previous week.
Conclusion
As we saw with the Super Bowl LVI, an out of the ordinary moment in a popular event, even when it’s broadcasted via television, causes changes in social media and Internet traffic. In the case of the Super Bowl LVI it was the Coinbase ad; here it was an unexpected incident on stage.
On the morning of March 8, a post to Hacker News stated that “All .fj domains have gone offline”, listing several hostnames in domains within the Fiji top level domain (known as a ccTLD) that had become unreachable. Commenters in the associated discussion thread had mixed results in being able to reach .fj hostnames—some were successful, while others saw failures. The fijivillage news site also highlighted the problem, noting that the issue also impacted Vodafone’s M-PAiSA app/service, preventing users from completing financial transactions.
The impact of this issue can be seen in traffic to Cloudflare customer zones in the .com.fj second-level domain. The graph below shows that HTTP traffic to these zones dropped by approximately 40% almost immediately starting around midnight UTC on March 8. Traffic volumes continued to decline throughout the rest of the morning.
Looking at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver data for queries for .com.fj hostnames, we can also see that error volume associated with those queries climbs significantly starting just after midnight as well. This means that our resolvers encountered issues with the answers from .fj servers.
This observation suggests that the problem was strictly DNS related, rather than connectivity related—Cloudflare Radar does not show any indication of an Internet disruption in Fiji coincident with the start of this problem.
It was suggested within the Hacker News comments that the problem could be DNSSEC related. Upon further investigation, it appears that may be the cause. In verifying the DNSSEC record for the .fj ccTLD, shown in the dig output below, we see that it states EDE: 9 (DNSKEY Missing): 'no SEP matching the DS found for fj.'
kdig fj. soa +dnssec @1.1.1.1
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY; status: SERVFAIL; id: 12710
;; Flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1; ANSWER: 0; AUTHORITY: 0; ADDITIONAL: 1
;; EDNS PSEUDOSECTION:
;; Version: 0; flags: do; UDP size: 1232 B; ext-rcode: NOERROR
;; EDE: 9 (DNSKEY Missing): 'no SEP matching the DS found for fj.'
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; fj. IN SOA
;; Received 73 B
;; Time 2022-03-08 08:57:41 EST
;; From 1.1.1.1@53(UDP) in 17.2 ms
Extended DNS Error 9 (EDE: 9) is defined as “A DS record existed at a parent, but no supported matching DNSKEY record could be found for the child.” The Cloudflare Learning Center article on DNSKEY and DS records explains this relationship:
The DS record is used to verify the authenticity of child zones of DNSSEC zones. The DS key record on a parent zone contains a hash of the KSK in a child zone. A DNSSEC resolver can therefore verify the authenticity of the child zone by hashing its KSK record, and comparing that to what is in the parent zone’s DS record.
Ultimately, it appears that around midnight UTC, the .fj zone started to be signed with a key that was not in the root zone DS, possibly as the result of a scheduled rollover that happened without checking that the root zone was updated first by IANA, which updates the root zone. (IANA owns contact with the TLD operators, and instructs the Root Zone Publisher on the changes to make in the next version of the root zone.)
DNSSEC problems as the root cause of the observed issue align with the observation in the Hacker News comments that some were able to access .fj websites, while others were not. Users behind resolvers doing strict DNSSEC validation would have seen an error in their browser, while users behind less strict resolvers would have been able to access the sites without a problem.
Conclusion
Further analysis of Cloudflare resolver metrics indicates that the problem was resolved around 1400 UTC, when the DS was updated. When DNSSEC is improperly configured for a single domain name, it can cause problems accessing websites or applications in that zone. However, when the misconfiguration occurs at a ccTLD level, the impact is much more significant. Unfortunately, this seems to occur all too often.
(Thank you to Ólafur Guðmundsson for his DNSSEC expertise.)
At Cloudflare, we’ve watched in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the possibility of war looked more likely, we began to carefully monitor the situation on the ground, with the goal of keeping our employees, our customers, and our network safe.
Helping protect Ukraine against cyberattacks
Attacks against the Internet in Ukraine began even before the start of the invasion. Those attacks—and the steady stream of DDoS attacks we’ve seen in the days since—prompted us to extend our services to Ukrainian government and telecom organizations at no cost in order to ensure they can continue to operate and deliver critical information to their citizens as well as to the rest of the world about what is happening to them.
Going beyond that, under Project Galileo, we are expediting onboarding of any Ukrainian entities for our full suite of protections. We are currently assisting more than sixty organizations in Ukraine and the region—with about 25% of those organizations coming aboard during the current crisis. Many of the new organizations are groups coming together to assist refugees, share vital information, or members of the Ukrainian diaspora in nearby countries looking to organize and help. Any Ukrainian organizations that are facing attack can apply for free protection under Project Galileo by visiting www.cloudflare.com/galileo, and we will expedite their review and approval.
Securing our customers’ data during the conflict
In order to preserve the integrity of customer data, we moved customer encryption key material out of our data centers in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Our services continued to operate in the regions using our Keyless SSL technology, which allows encryption sessions to be terminated in a secure data center away from where there may be a risk of compromise.
If any of our facilities or servers in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia lose power or connectivity to the Internet, we have configured them to brick themselves. All data on disk is encrypted with keys that are not stored on site. Bricked machines will not be able to be booted unless a secure, machine-specific key that is not stored on site is entered.
Monitoring Internet availability in Ukraine
Our team continues to monitor Internet patterns across Ukraine. While usage across the country has declined over the last 10 days, we are thankful that in most locations the Internet is still accessible.
We are taking steps to ensure that, as long as there is connectivity out of the country, our services will continue to operate.
Staying ahead of the threat globally
Cyber threats to Ukrainian customers and telecoms is only part of the broader story of potential cyberattacks. Governments around the world have emphasized that organizations must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for example, has recommended that all organizations—large and small—go “Shields Up” to protect themselves from attack. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has encouraged organizations to improve their cyber resilience.
This is where careful monitoring of the attacks in Ukraine is so important. It doesn’t just help our customers in Ukraine — it helps us learn and improve our products so that we can protect all of our customers globally. When wiper malware was identified in Ukraine, for example, we adapted our Zero Trust products to make sure our customers were protected.
We’ve long believed that everyone should have access to cybersecurity tools to protect themselves, regardless of their size or resources. But during this time of heightened threat, access to cybersecurity services is particularly critical. We have a number of free services available to protect you online — and we encourage you to take advantage of them.
Providing services in Russia
Since the invasion, providing any services in Russia is understandably fraught. Governments have been united in imposing a stream of new sanctions and there have even been some calls to disconnect Russia from the global Internet. As discussed by ICANN, the Internet Society, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Techdirt, among others, the consequences of such a shutdown would be profound.
The scope of new sanctions issued in the last few weeks have been unprecedented in their reach, frequency, and the number of different governments involved. Governments have issued sweeping new sanctions designed to impose severe costs against those who supported the invasion of Ukraine, including government entities and officials in Russia and Belarus. Sanctions have been imposed against Russia’s top financial institutions, including Russia’s two largest banks, fundamentally altering the ability of Russians to access capital. The entire break away territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, including all of the residents of those regions, are subject to comprehensive sanctions. We’ve seen sanctions on state-owned enterprises, elite Russian families, and the leaders of intelligence-directed disinformation outlets.
These sanctions are intended to make sure that those who supported the invasion are held to account. And Cloudflare has taken action to comply. Over the past several years, Cloudflare has developed a robust and comprehensive sanctions compliance program that allows us to track and take immediate steps to comply with new sanctions regulations as they are implemented. In addition to an internal compliance team and outside counsel, we employ third party tools to flag potential matches or partial ownership by sanctioned parties, and we review reports from third-parties about potential connections. We have also worked with government experts inside and outside of the United States to identify when there is a connection between a sanctioned entity and a Cloudflare account.
Over the past week, our team has ensured that we are complying with these new sanctions as they are announced. We have closed off paid access to our network and systems in the new comprehensively-sanctioned regions. And we have terminated any customers we have identified as tied to sanctions, including those related to Russian financial institutions, Russian influence campaigns, and the Russian-affiliated Donetsk and Luhansk governments. We expect additional sanctions are likely to come from governments as they determine additional steps are appropriate, and we will continue to move quickly to comply with those requirements as they are announced.
Beyond this, we have received several calls to terminate all of Cloudflare’s services inside Russia. We have carefully considered these requests and discussed them with government and civil society experts. Our conclusion, in consultation with those experts, is that Russia needs more Internet access, not less.
As the conflict has continued, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in requests from Russian networks to worldwide media, reflecting a desire by ordinary Russian citizens to see world news beyond that provided within Russia.
We’ve also seen an increase in Russian blocking and throttling efforts, combined with Russian efforts to control the content of the media operating inside Russia with a new “fake news” law.
The Russian government itself, over the last several years, has threatened repeatedly to block certain Cloudflare services and customers. Indiscriminately terminating service would do little to harm the Russian government, but would both limit access to information outside the country, and make significantly more vulnerable those who have used us to shield themselves as they have criticized the government.
In fact, we believe the Russian government would celebrate us shutting down Cloudflare’s services in Russia. We absolutely appreciate the spirit of many Ukrainians making requests across the tech sector for companies to terminate services in Russia. However, when what Cloudflare is fundamentally providing is a more open, private, and secure Internet, we believe that shutting down Cloudflare’s services entirely in Russia would be a mistake.
Our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine and the entire team at Cloudflare prays for a peaceful resolution as soon as possible.
Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities worldwide where we connect our equipment to the Internet to provide our broad range of services. We have data centers in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and across the world. To operate our service we monitor traffic trends, performance and errors seen at each data center, aggregate data about DNS, and congestion and packet loss on Internet links.
Internet Traffic
For reference, here is a map of Ukraine showing its major cities. Note that whenever we talk about dates and times in this post, we are using UTC. Ukraine’s current time zone is UTC+2.
Internet traffic in Ukraine generally follows a pretty predictable pattern based on day and night. Lowest in the hours after local midnight and picking up as people wake up. It’s not uncommon to see a dip around lunchtime and a peak when people go home in the evening. That pattern is clearly visible in this chart of overall Internet traffic seen by Cloudflare for Ukrainian networks on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prior to the invasion.
Starting Thursday, traffic was significantly lower. On Thursday, we saw about 70% of our normal request volume and about 60% on Friday. Request volumes recovered to 70% of pre-invasion volume on Saturday and Sunday before peaking on Monday and Tuesday because of attacks that we mitigated coming from networks in Ukraine.
This chart shows attack traffic blocked by Cloudflare that originated on networks in Ukraine. Note that this is quite different from attacks against .ua domains, which can originate anywhere in the world and are discussed below.
Analysis of network traffic from different cities in Ukraine gives us some insight into people’s use of the Internet and availability of Internet access. Here’s Internet traffic from the capital, Kyiv:
Once again the “normal” ebb and flow of Internet traffic is seen on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Early on Thursday morning, Internet traffic picks up after Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the attack but never reaches normal levels that day. Friday is even lower, but traffic in Kyiv has gradually increased since then.
Moving westward to Lviv, we see a very different pattern of use.
The same normal flows on Monday to Wednesday are visible, followed by a smaller drop for three days and then a dramatic increase in traffic. As many Ukrainians have moved westward towards Poland, Slovakia and Romania, away from the fighting, it appears that Internet traffic has grown with their arrival in Lviv.
The city of Uzhhorod on the Slovakian border shows a similar pattern.
To the east of Lviv, the city of Ternopil has also seen an increase in Internet traffic.
As has Rivne.
Looking at Rivne, Ternopil, Uzhhorod, and Lviv, it’s possible that the peaks in Internet traffic on different days show the movement of people westward as they try to escape fighting around the capital and in the east and south.
On the opposite side of Ukraine, the situation is quite different. Here’s the traffic pattern for the city of Kharkiv. It has stayed at roughly between 50% and 60% (March 3) of the usual rate since the beginning of the invasion.
North of Kharkiv, the city of Sumy (north-eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border), traffic levels are very low since yesterday, March 3, 2022.
A similar trend can be seen in the city Izyum, south of Kharkiv (east of Ukraine), where traffic is very low since March 2.
Traffic in Donetsk has remained fairly consistent throughout the invasion, except for March 1 when there was a dramatic change in traffic. This was most likely caused by an attack against a single .ua domain name, with the attack traffic coming, at least in part, from Donetsk.
Some other areas with fighting have experienced the largest drops and partial Internet outages. Moving to the south, traffic in Mariupol declined after the invasion and has dropped dramatically in the last three days with outages on local networks.
Here’s a view of traffic from AS43554 in Mariupol showing what seems to be a total outage on March 1 that continued through March 4.
To the west of Mariupol, Osypenko shows a gradual decline in traffic followed by three days of minimal Internet use.
Similar large drops are seen in Irpin (just outside Kyiv to the northwest).
And in Bucha, which is next to Irpin; both Bucha and Irpin are close to Hostomel airport.
There has also been minimal traffic (or possible outage) from Severodonetsk (north of Luhansk) for the past four of days.
We have started to see traffic from Starlink terminals in Ukraine, although traffic levels remain very low.
Cyberattacks
The physical world invasion has been accompanied by an increase in cyberattacks against Ukrainian domain names and networks.
Just prior to the invasion, on February 23, Cloudflare’s automated systems detected a large amount of packet loss on a major Internet connection to our Kyiv data center and automatically mitigated the problem by routing traffic onto other networks. This packet loss was caused by congestion on the transit provider’s network, which in turn was caused by a large DDoS attack. It appeared in our dashboards as packet loss over a 30-minute period between 1500-1530 (the different colors are different parts of our network infrastructure in Kyiv).
This next chart gives an overview of traffic to .ua domains protected by Cloudflare and requests that are “mitigated” (i.e. blocked by our firewall products). The chart shows only layer 7 traffic and does not give information about layer 3/4 DDoS, which is covered separately below.
On the first day of the invasion attacks against .ua domains were prevalent and at times responsible for almost 50% of the requests being sent to those domains. From Friday, February 25 attacks returned to levels seen prior to the invasion and started picking up again on Tuesday, March 1.
Digging into the layer 7 mitigations we can see that the biggest attacks over all are layer 7 DDoS attacks.
The next largest attacks are being mitigated by firewall rules put in place by customers.
Followed by blocking requests based on our IP threat reputation database.
Layer 3/4 traffic is harder to attribute to a specific domain or target as IP addresses are shared across different customers. Looking at network-level DDoS traffic hitting our Kyiv data center, we see occasional peaks of DDoS traffic reaching a high of nearly 1.8 Gbps.
Note that although the layer 3/4 and layer 7 attacks we are mitigating have been relatively small, that does not mean they are not devastating or problematic. A small website or service can be taken down by relatively small attacks, and the layer 7 attack traffic often includes vulnerability scanning, credential stuffing, SQL injection, and the usual panoply of techniques carried out to either deface or penetrate an Internet service.
Unprotected Internet properties are vulnerable to even small attacks and need protection.
Social media and communications
Much of the imagery and information coming out of Ukraine is being shared on social networks. Looking at social networks in Ukraine via DNS data shows that Facebook use has increased.
As has Instagram.
However, TikTok seems to have lost traffic initially, but it has started to return (although not to its pre-conflict levels) in the last two days.
Twitter usage increased and has remained higher than levels seen before the invasion.
Turning to messaging apps, we can compare Messenger, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. WhatsApp traffic appears to have declined inline with the broad change in Internet traffic across Ukraine.
Telegram stayed largely unchanged until early this week, when we observed a small increase in use.
Messenger shows a similar pattern.
But the largest change has been traffic to the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal, which has seen dramatic growth since the invasion began. We are seeing 8x to 10x the DNS volume for Signal as compared to the days before the start of the conflict.
This is not what I imagined my first blog article would look like, but here we go.
On February 1, 2022, a configuration error on one of our routers caused a route leak of up to 2,000 Internet prefixes to one of our Internet transit providers. This leak lasted for 32 seconds and at a later time 7 seconds. We did not see any traffic spikes or drops in our network and did not see any customer impact because of this error, but this may have caused an impact to external parties, and we are sorry for the mistake.
Timeline
All timestamps are UTC.
As part of our efforts to build the best network, we regularly update our Internet transit and peering links throughout our network. On February 1, 2022, we had a “hot-cut” scheduled with one of our Internet transit providers to simultaneously update router configurations on Cloudflare and ISP routers to migrate one of our existing Internet transit links in Newark to a link with more capacity. Doing a “hot-cut” means that both parties will change cabling and configuration at the same time, usually while being on a conference call, to reduce downtime and impact on the network. The migration started off-peak at 10:45 (05:45 local time) with our network engineer entering the bridge call with our data center engineers and remote hands on site as well as operators from the ISP.
At 11:17, we connected the new fiber link and established the BGP sessions to the ISP successfully. We had BGP filters in place on our end to not accept and send any prefixes, so we could evaluate the connection and settings without any impact on our network and services.
As the connection between our router and the ISP — like most Internet connections — was realized over a fiber link, the first item to check are the “light levels” of that link. This shows the strength of the optical signal received by our router from the ISP router and can indicate a bad connection when it’s too low. Low light levels are likely caused by unclean fiber ends or not fully seated connectors, but may also indicate a defective optical transceiver which connects the fiber link to the router – all of which can degrade service quality.
The next item on the checklist is interface errors, which will occur when a network device receives incorrect or malformed network packets, which would also indicate a bad connection and would likely lead to a degradation in service quality, too.
As light levels were good, and we observed no errors on the link, we deemed it ready for production and removed the BGP reject filters at 11:22.
This immediately triggered the maximum prefix-limit protection the ISP had configured on the BGP session and shut down the session, preventing further impact. The maximum prefix-limit is a safeguard in BGP to prevent the spread of route leaks and to protect the Internet. The limit is usually set just a little higher than the expected number of Internet prefixes from a peer to leave some headroom for growth but also catch configuration errors fast. The configured value was just 40 prefixes short of the number of prefixes we were advertising at that site, so this was considered the reason for the session to be shut down. After checking back internally, we asked the ISP to raise the prefix-limit, which they did.
The BGP session was reestablished at 12:08 and immediately shut down again. The problem was identified and fixed at 12:14.
10:45: Start of scheduled maintenance
11:17: New link was connected and BGP sessions went up (filters still in place)
11:22: Link was deemed ready for production and filters removed
11:23: BGP sessions were torn down by ISP router due to configured prefix-limit
12:08: ISP configures higher prefix-limits, BGP sessions briefly come up again and are shut down
12:14: Issue identified and configuration updated
What happened and what we’re doing about it
The outage occurred while migrating one of our Internet transits to a link with more capacity. Once the new link and a BGP session had been established, and the link deemed error-free, our network engineering team followed the peer-reviewed deployment plan. The team removed the filters from the BGP sessions, which prevented the Cloudflare router from accepting and sending prefixes via BGP.
Due to an oversight in the deployment plan, which had been peer-reviewed before without noticing this issue, no BGP filters to only export prefixes of Cloudflare and our customers were added. A peer review on the internal chat did not notice this either, so the network engineer performing this change went ahead.
ewr02# show |compare
[edit protocols bgp group 4-ORANGE-TRANSIT]
- import REJECT-ALL;
- export REJECT-ALL;
[edit protocols bgp group 6-ORANGE-TRANSIT]
- import REJECT-ALL;
- export REJECT-ALL;
The change resulted in our router sending all known prefixes to the ISP router, which shut down the session as the number of prefixes received exceeded the maximum prefix-limit configured.
As the configured values for the maximum prefix-limits turned out to be rather low for the number of prefixes on our network, this didn’t come as a surprise to our network engineering team and no investigation into why the BGP session went down was started. The prefix-limit being too low seemed to be a perfectly valid reason.
We asked the ISP to increase the prefix-limit, which they did after they received approval on their side. Once the prefix-limit had been increased and the previously shutdown BGP sessions reset, the sessions were reestablished but were shut down immediately as the maximum prefix-limit was triggered again. This is when our network engineer started questioning whether there was another issue at fault and found and corrected the configuration error previously overlooked.
We made the following change in response to this event: we introduced an implicit reject policy for BGP sessions which will take effect if no import/export policy is configured for a specific BGP neighbor or neighbor group. This change has been deployed.
BGP security & preventing route-leaks — what’s in the cards?
Route leaks aren’t new, and they keep happening. The industry has come up with many approaches to limit the impact or even prevent route-leaks. Policies and filters are used to control which prefixes should be exported to or imported from a given peer. RPKI can help to make sure only allowed prefixes are accepted from a peer and a maximum prefix-limit can act as a last line of defense when everything else fails.
BGP policies and filters are commonly used to ensure only explicitly allowed prefixes are sent out to BGP peers, usually only allowing prefixes owned by the entity operating the network and its customers. They can also be used to tweak some knobs (BGP local-pref, MED, AS path prepend, etc.) to influence routing decisions and balance traffic across links. This is what the policies we have in place for our peers and transits do. As explained above, the maximum prefix-limit is intended to tear down BGP sessions if more prefixes are being sent or received than to be expected. We have talked about RPKI before, it’s the required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing, and we still are on our path to securing Internet Routing.
To improve the overall stability of the Internet even more, in 2017, a new Internet standard was proposed, which adds another layer of protection into the mix: RFC8212 defines Default External BGP (EBGP) Route Propagation Behavior without Policies which pretty much tackles the exact issues we were facing.
This RFC updates the BGP-4 standard (RFC4271) which defines how BGP works and what vendors are expected to implement. On the Juniper operating system, JunOS, this can be activated by setting defaults ebgp no-policy reject-always on the protocols bgp hierarchy level starting with Junos OS Release 20.3R1.
If you are running an older version of JunOS, a similar effect can be achieved by defining a REJECT-ALL policy and setting this as import/export policy on the protocols bgp hierarchy level. Note that this will also affect iBGP sessions, which the solution above will have no impact on.
We are sorry for leaking routes of prefixes which did not belong to Cloudflare or our customers and to network engineers who got paged as a result of this.
We have processes in place to make sure that changes to our infrastructure are reviewed before being executed, so potential issues can be spotted before they reach production. In this case, the review process failed to catch this configuration error. In response, we will increase our efforts to further our network automation, to fully derive the device configuration from an intended state.
While this configuration error was caused by human error, it could have been detected and mitigated significantly faster if the confirmation bias did not kick in, making the operator think the observed behavior was to be expected. This error underlines the importance of our existing efforts on training our people to be aware of biases we have in our life. This also serves as a great example on how confirmation bias can influence and impact our work and that we should question our conclusions (early).
It also shows how important protocols like RPKI are. Route leaks are something even experienced network operators can cause accidentally, and technical solutions are needed to reduce the impact of leaks whether they are intentional or the result of an error.
The early hours of Sunday, January 23, 2022, started in Burkina Faso with an Internet outage or shutdown. Heavy gunfire in an army mutiny could be related to the outage according to the New York Times (“mobile Internet services were shut down”). As of today, there are three countries affected by major Internet disruptions — Tonga and Yemen are the others.
Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic dropped significantly in the West African country after ~09:15 UTC (the same in local time) and remains low more than 24 hours later. Burkina Faso also had a mobile Internet shutdown on January 10, 2022, and another we reported in late November 2021.
The main ISPs from Burkina Faso were affected. The two leading Internet Service Providers Orange and FasoNet lost Internet traffic after 09:15 UTC, but also Telecel Faso, as the next chart shows. This morning, at around 10:00 UTC there was some traffic from FasoNet but less than half of what we saw at the same time in preceding days.
It’s not only mobile traffic that is affected. Desktop traffic is also impacted. In Burkina Faso, our data shows that mobile devices normally represent 70% of Internet traffic.
With the Burkina Faso disruption, three countries are currently mostly without access to the Internet for different reasons.
In Tonga, the nine day-long outage that we also explained is related to problems in the undersea cable caused by the large volcanic eruption in the South Pacific archipelago.
Several significant Internet disruptions have already occurred in 2022 for different reasons:
1. An Internet outage that lasted a few hours in The Gambia because of a cable problem (on January 4). 2. A six days Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan because of unrest (from January 5 to January 11). 3. A mobile Internet shutdown in Burkina Faso because of a coup plot (on January 10). 4. An Internet outage in Tonga because of a volcanic eruption (ongoing since January 15). 5. An Internet outage in Yemen because of airstrikes that affected a telecommunications building (ongoing since January 20,). 6. This second Internet disruption in Burkina Faso is related to military unrest (ongoing since January 23).
2022 only has 19 days of existence but so far this January, there have already been four significant Internet disruptions:
1. An Internet outage in The Gambia because of a cable problem. 2. An Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan because of unrest. 3. A mobile Internet shutdown in Burkina Faso because of a coup plot. 4. An Internet outage in Tonga because of a volcanic eruption.
The latest Internet outage, in the South Pacific country of Tonga (with 169 islands), is still ongoing. It started with the large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an uninhabited volcanic island of the Tongan archipelago on Friday, January 14, 2022. The next day, Cloudflare Radar shows that the Internet outage started at around 03:00 UTC (16:00 local time) — Saturday, January 15, 2022 — and is ongoing for more than four days. Tonga’s 105,000 residents are almost entirely unreachable, according to the BBC.
When we focus on the number of requests by ASN, the country’s main ISPs Digicel and Kalianet started to lose traffic after 03:00 UTC and by 05:30 UTC January 15, 2022, Cloudflare saw close to no traffic at all from them, as shown in the graph below.
Looking at the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates from Tonga’s ASNs around the time of the outage, we see a clear spike at 05:35 UTC (18:35 local time). These update messages are BGP signalling that the Tongan ASNs are no longer routable. We saw the same trend in The Gambia outage of January 4, 2022 — there you can read about the importance of BGP as a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems on the Internet, something that was also seen in the 2021 Facebook outage.
BGP updates from Tongan ASNs around the time of the outage.
Cloudflare Radar data doesn’t show any significant disruptions for Internet traffic in Tonga’s neighbours American Samoa (although there was a small decrease in traffic on Friday and Saturday, January 14 and 15, 2022 in comparison with the previous week) and Fiji. In American Samoa, all schools were closed on Friday, January 14, because of severe weather, and on the same day, after the volcanic eruption, there were tsunami warnings and evacuation to higher ground was advised (that continued through the weekend).
Tonga, as a geographically remote Polynesian country more than 800 km from the Fiji archipelago, is highly dependent on the Internet for communications. That is something that was improved five years ago with an infrastructure connectivity program from the World Bank. Prior to that, the country was dependent on satellite links for Internet that included a very small percentage of the population.
Repairs could take a few weeks
Southern Cross Cable Network confirmed that the 827 km fiber-optic undersea communications cable connecting Tonga to the outside world may have been broken. The company is assisting Tonga Cable Limited (TCL), which owns the single cable that provides Internet access and almost all communications to and from the archipelago.
The eruption resulted in a fault in the international cable 37 kilometres from Nukuʻalofa (Tonga’s capital), and a further fault in a domestic cable 47 km from the capital.
TCL announced that it has already met with the US cable company SubCom to start preparations for SubCom’s cable repair ship Reliance to be dispatched from Papua New Guinea to Tonga, possibly via Samoa (more than 4,000 km away).
The repairs could take “at least” four weeks, given that a repair to a fiber-optic cable that has been cut on the seabed is considered more complicated than misconfigurations, power outages or other types of infrastructure damage. “The site conditions in Tonga have to be assessed thoroughly because of volcanic activities,” according to TCL chairman Samiuela Fonua.
Fonua also mentioned that the last cable cut (back in 2019) took nearly two weeks to repair, but this time the site conditions will determine the time it will take — the two cables are not far away from the eruption site (the volcano is still active). According to ZDNet, in 2019 Tonga signed a 15-year deal with Kacific for satellite connectivity, but since then the satellite provider says it is waiting on the Tongan government to activate its contract.
Svalbard Undersea Cable System also disrupted in January
Also in January, Space Norway, the operator of the world’s most northern submarine cable — the Svalbard Undersea Cable System — announced that on January 7 it located a disruption in one of the two twin submarine fiber optic communication cables connecting Longyearbyen with Andøya north of Harstad in northern Norway (in the area where the seabed goes from 300 meters down to 2,700 meters in the Greenland Sea). A repair mission is being planned.
A world of undersea cables for the world’s communications
A significant amount of Internet traffic is carried by a complex network of undersea fiber-optic cables that connect countries and continents. The full submarine cable system (the first communications cables laid were from the 1850s and carried telegraphy traffic) is what makes most of the world’s Internet function between countries and continents. There are 428 active submarine cables (36 are planned), running in an estimate of 1.3 million km around the globe.
World map of submarine cables. Antarctica is the only continent not yet reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com)
This gives a sense that the Internet is literally a network of networks in a world where estimates indicate that around 99% of the data traffic that is crossing oceans is carried by these undersea cables (satellite Internet, so far, is still residual — SpaceX has around 145,000 users).
The reliability of submarine cables is high, especially when multiple paths are available in the event of a cable break. That’s not the case for the Tonga outage, given that the 827 km submarine cable only connects Fiji to the Tonga archipelago — Fiji is connected to the main Southern Cross Cable, as the next image illustrates.
Submarine Cable Map shows the undersea cables that connect Australia to Fiji and the following connections to other archipelagos like Tonga. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com)
🇹🇴Volcano Tonga-Hunga erupted Sat 15JAN22, causing extensive damage to the region, cutting off communications over both the TDCE domestic cable and the 🇹🇴-🇫🇯 international cable
The total carrying capacity of submarine cables is enormous (EllaLink, the optical submarine cable linking the European and South American continents, for example, has 100 Tbps capacity) and grows year after year as the world gets more and more connected. For example, Google has recently finished a new cable with 350 Tbps of capacity. But, a transoceanic submarine cable system costs several hundred million dollars to construct. One of the latest, between Portugal and Egypt, with a total of 8,700 kilometers, is budgeted at 326 million euros.
The Tonga outage was not the only one of 2022 (so far) that happened because of cable problems. The Gambia outage that affected the country’s main ISP, Gamtel, was because of “a primary link failure at ACE”, the cable system that serves 24 countries, from Europe to Africa, namely in the points of cable connections from Senegal to The Gambia.
In spite of these two fiber cable problems being separated by a few days at the start of 2022, Internet outages are more common because of situations like misconfigurations, power outages, extreme weather or the frequent state-imposed shutdowns to deal with unrest, elections or exams — recently this was the case of Sudan or Kazakhstan.
In 2021, we continued to live with the effects of the COVID pandemic and Internet traffic was also impacted by it. Although learning and exercising may have started to get back to something close to normal (depending on the country), the effects of what started almost two years ago on the way people work and communicate seems to be here to stay, and the lockdowns or restrictions continue to have an impact on where and how people go online.
So, Cloudflare Radar’s 2021 Year In Review is out with interactive maps and charts you can use to explore what changed on the Internet throughout this past year. Year In Review is part of Cloudflare Radar. We launched Radar in September 2020 to give anyone access to Internet use and abuse trends.
This year we’ve added a mobile vs desktop traffic chart, but also the attack distribution that shows the evolution throughout the year — the beginning of July 2021, more than a month after the famous Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, was the time of the year when attacks worldwide peaked.
There are also interesting pandemic-related trends like the (lack) of Internet activity in Tokyo with the Summer Olympics in town and how Thanksgiving week in the US in late November affected mobile traffic in the United States.
In 2020 by late April we saw that the Internet had seen incredible, sudden growth in traffic because of lockdowns and that was sustained throughout the year as we showed in our 2020 Year In Review. 2021 told a slightly different story, depending on the country.
The big April-March and May Internet traffic peak from 2020 related to the pandemic wasn’t there, in the same way, this year — it was more distributed depending on the local restrictions. In 2021, Internet traffic, globally, continued to grow throughout the year, and it was at the end of the year that was higher (a normal trend, given there’s a growth in categories like online shopping and the colder season in the Northern Hemisphere, where most Internet traffic occurs, affects human behaviour).
The day of the year with the highest growth in traffic worldwide, from our standpoint, was December 2, 2021, with 20% more than the first week of the year — the Y-axis shows the percentage change in Internet traffic using a cohort of top domains from each country. But in May there was also a bump (highlighted in red as a possible pandemic-related occurrence), although not as high as we saw in the March-May period of last year.
Spikes in Internet traffic — Worldwide 2021
#1 November-December1 (+23%) #2 September (+20%) #3 October (+19%) #4 August (+16%) #5 May (+13%) 1Beginning of December
When we focus on specific countries using our Year In Review 2021 page you can see that new restrictions or lockdowns affected (again) Internet traffic and, in some countries, that is more evident than others.
In the following table, we show the months with the highest traffic growth (the percentage shown focus on the spikes). From our standpoint the last four months of the year usually have the highest growth in traffic after September, but Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Portugal, South Korea and Brazil seemed to show (in red) an impact of restrictions in their Internet traffic — with higher increases in the first five months of the year.
Months with the largest traffic growth — 2021
United States
#1 November-Dec (+30%) #2 October (+26%) #3 September (+25%) #4 August (+15%) #5 May (+13%)
Canada
#1 November-Dec (+21%) #2 October (+10%) #3 April (+9%) #4 May (+8%) #5 March (+7%)
UK
#1 November-Dec (+23%) #2 March (+13%) #3 October (+12%) #4 February (+7%) #5 September (+5%)
Germany
#1 November-Dec (+25%) #2 October (+15%) #3 May (+7%) #4 February (+6%) #5 September (+5%)
France
#1 November-Dec (+24%) #2 May (+14%) #3 April (+13%) #4 January (+8%) #5 February (+7%)
Japan
#1 November-Dec (+32%) #2 October (+28%) #3 September (+28%) #4 August (+24%) #5 July (+18%)
Australia
#1 November-Dec (+42%) #2 September (+38%) #3 October (+37%) #4 August (+32%) #5 July (+27%)
Singapore
#1 November-Dec (+62%) #2 October (+58%) #3 September (+58%) #4 August (+41%) #5 July (+31%)
Portugal
#1February (+38%) #2 March (+23%) #3 January (+22%) #4 November-Dec (+18%) #5 April (+17%)
South Korea
#1 April (+21%) #2 May (+16%) #3 February (+10%) #4 August (+7%) #5 September (+7%)
Brazil
#1 May (+25%) #2 June (+23%) #3 November-Dec (+22%) #4 April (+21%) #5 July (+21%)
India
#1 November-Dec (+24%) #2 September (+22%) #3 October (+21%) #4 August (+19%) #5 July (+10%)
When we look at those countries’ trends we can see that Canada had lockdowns at the beginning of February that went through March and May, depending on the area of the country. That is in line with what we’ve seen in 2020: when restrictions/lockdowns are up, people tend to use the Internet more to communicate, work, exercise and learn.
Most of Europe also started 2021 with lockdowns and restrictions that included schools — so online learning was back on. That’s clear in the UK. From January to March showed a high increase in traffic percentage that went down when restrictions were relaxed.
The lines here show Internet traffic growth from our standpoint throughout 2020 and 2021 in the UK
The same happens in Portugal, where new measures on January 21, 2021, put the three first months of the year in the top 3 of the year in terms of growth of traffic, and April was #5.
We can also check the example of France. Lockdowns were imposed again especially during April and May 2021, and we can see the growth in Internet traffic during those months, slightly more timid than the first lockdown of 2020, but nonetheless evident in the 2021 chart.
Germany had the same situation in May (in April work from home was again the rule and the relaxation of measures for vaccinated people only began in mid-May), but in February the lockdown that started at the end of 2020 (and included schools) was also having an impact on Internet traffic.
In South Korea there was also an impact of the beginning of the year lockdown seen in spikes through February, April and May 2021.
Internet traffic growth in the United States had a very different year in 2021 than it had the year before, when the first lockdown had a major effect on Internet growth, but still, May was a month of high growth — it was in mid-May that there were new guidelines from the CDC about masks.
Mobile traffic: The Thanksgiving effect
Another trend worldwide from 2021 is the mobile traffic percentage evolution. Worldwide, from our standpoint, the more mobile-friendly months of the year — where mobile devices were more prevalent to go online — were July and August (typical vacations months in most of the Northern Hemisphere), but January and November were also very strong.
On our Year in Review page, you can also see the new mobile vs desktop traffic chart. The evolution of the importance of mobile traffic is different depending on the country.
For example, the United States has more desktop traffic throughout the year, but in 2021, during the Thanksgiving (November 25) week, mobile traffic took the lead for the first and only time in the whole year. We can also see that in July mobile traffic was also high in terms of relevance.
The UK has a similar trend, with June, July and August being the only months of the year when mobile traffic is prevalent compared to desktop.
If we go to the other side of the planet, to Singapore, there the mobile percentage is usually higher than desktop, and we see a completely different trend than in the US. Mobile traffic was higher in May, and desktop only went above mobile in some days of February, some in March, and especially after the end of October.
Where people accessed the Internet
We also have, again, available the possibility of selecting a city from the map of our Year in Review to zoom into a city to see the change in Internet use throughout the year. Let’s zoom in on San Francisco.
The following agglomeration of maps highlights (all available in our Year in Review site) the change in Internet use comparing the start of 2020, mid-January to mid-March — you can see that there’s still some increase in traffic, in orange —, to the total lockdown situation of April and May, with more blue areas (decrease in traffic).
The red circles shows San Francisco and its surroundings (home of a lot of companies) in a map that compares working hours Internet use on a weekday between two months.
The same trend is seen already in May 2021 in a time when remote work continued to be strong — especially in tech companies (employees moved from the Bay Area). Only in June of this year, there was some increase in traffic (more orange areas), especially further away from San Francisco (in residential areas).
London: From lockdown to a Euro Championship final
London tells us a different story. Looking through the evolution since the start of 2020 we can see that in March (compared to January) we have an increase in traffic (in orange) outside London (where blue is dominant).
The Internet activity only starts to get heavier in June, in time for the kick-off of the 2020 UEFA European Championship. The tournament played in several cities in Europe had a lot of restrictions and a number of games were played in London at Wembley Stadium — where Italy won the final by beating England on penalties. But at the time of the final, July, and especially August, blue was already dominant again — so people seemed to leave the London area. Only in September and October did the traffic start to pick up again, but mostly outside the city centre.
The Summer Olympics impact? Tokyo with low activity
After the UEFA European Championship, came the other big event postponed back in 2020, the Tokyo Summer Olympics. Our map seems to show the troubled months before the event with the pandemic numbers and the restrictions rising before the dates of the major event — late July and the first days of August.
There were athletes, but not fans from around the world and even locals weren’t attending — it was largely an event held behind closed doors with no public spectators permitted due to the declaration of a state of emergency in the Greater Tokyo Area. We can see that in our charts, especially when looking at the increase in activity in March (compared to January) and the decrease in August (compared to June), even with a global event in town (Tokyo is in the red circle).
There’s also another interesting trend pandemic-related in Lisbon, Portugal. With the lockdowns put in place since mid-January, the comparison with March shows the centre of the city losing Internet traffic and the residential areas outside Lisbon gaining it (in orange in the animation). But in April the activity decreased even around Lisbon and only started to get heavier in May when restrictions were more a lot more relaxed.
Lockdowns bring more traffic to Berlin
A different trend can be seen in Berlin, Germany. Internet activity in the city and its surroundings was very high in March and in April (compared to the previous two months) at a time when lockdowns were in place — nonetheless, in 2020 the activity decreased in April with the first major lockdown.
But in May and June, with the relaxation in restrictions, Internet activity decreased (blue) giving the idea that people left the city or, at least, weren’t using the Internet so much. Only in August did Internet activity begin to pick up again, but decreased once more in the colder months of November and December.
Cyberattacks: Threats that came in July
In terms of worldwide attacks, July and November (the month of Black Friday, when it reached a 78% in increase) were definitely the months with the highest peak of the year. The biggest peak was at the beginning of July 2021, when it reached 82%. That was more than a month after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware cyberattack — May was also the month of an attack on part of Toshiba and, in the same week, the Irish health system and of the meat processing company JBS.
The week of December 6 (the same when the Log4j vulnerability was disclosed) also had an increase in attacks — 42% more, and there was also a clear increase (42%) in the beginning of October, around the time of the Facebook outage.
In our dedicated page you can check — for the first time this year — the attack distribution in a selection of countries.
The UK had a very noticeable peak in overall Internet attacks (a growth of 150%) in August and that continued through September. We already saw that the beginning of the year, because of lockdowns, also had an increase in Internet traffic, and we can also see an increase in attacks in January 2021, but also in late November — around the time of the Black Friday week.
The United States, on the other hand, saw a growth in threats that was more uniform throughout the year. The biggest spike was between August and September (a time when students, depending on the state, were going back to school), with 65% of growth. July also had a big spike in threats (58%), but also late May (48%) — that was the month of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware cyberattack. Late November also had a spike (29%).
Countries like France had their peak in attacks (420% more) in late September and Germany it was in June (425%), but also in October (380%) and in November (350%).
The same trend can be seen in Singapore, but with an even higher growth. It reached 1,000% more threats in late November and 900% in the same month, around the time of the famous Singles’ Day (11.11, on November 11), the main e-commerce event in the region.
Also in the region, Australia, for example, also saw a big increase (more than 100%) in attacks in the beginning of September. In Japan, it was more in late May (over 40% of growth in threats).
What people did online in 2021
Last year we saw how the e-commerce category jumped in several countries after the first major lockdown — late March.
In New York, Black Friday, November 26, 2021, was the day of the whole year that e-commerce traffic peaked — it represented 31.9% of traffic, followed by Cyber Monday, November 29, with 26.6% (San Francisco has the same trend). It’s also interesting to see that in 2020 the same category peaked Black Friday, November 27, 2020 (24.3%) but April 22, during the first lockdowns, was a close second at 23.1% (this year the category only had ~14% in April).
Also with no surprise, messaging traffic peaked (20.6%) in the city that never sleeps on the first day of the year, January 1, 2021, to celebrate the New Year.
London calling (pre-Valentine messages)
But countries, cities and the people who live there have different patterns and in London messaging traffic actually peaks at 21.5% of traffic on Friday, February 12, 2021 (two days before Valentine’s Day). While in London, let’s check if Black Friday was also big outside the US. And the answer is: yes! E-commerce traffic peaked at 20.7% of traffic precisely on Black Friday, November 26.
The pandemic also has an influence in the types of websites people use and in London, travel websites had the biggest percentage in traffic on August 8, with only 1.4% — in Munich it was 1.1% on August 11. On the other hand, in New York and San Francisco, travel websites always had less than 1% of traffic.
Going back to Europe, Paris, France, saw a different trend. Travel websites had 1.9% of traffic on June 7, 2021, precisely the week that the pandemic restrictions were lifted — France opened to international travelers on June 9, 2021. The “City of Light” (and love) had its biggest day of the year for messaging websites (24.4%) on Sunday, January 31 — a time when there were new restrictions announced to try to avoid a total lockdown.
The hacker attack: 2021 methods
Our Year in Review site also lets you dig into which attack methods gained the most traction in 2021. It is a given that hackers continued to run their tools to attack websites, overwhelm APIs, and try to exfiltrate data — recently the Log4j vulnerability exposed the Internet to new possible exploitation.
Just to give some examples, in Paris “faking search engine bots” represented 48.3% of the attacks selected for the chart on January 14, 2021, but “SQL Injection” got to 59% on April 29.
Cyberattacks distribution throughout the year in San Francisco
In London “User-Agent Anomaly” was also relevant in some parts of the year, but in San Francisco it was mostly “information disclosure” that was more prevalent, especially in late November, at a time when online shopping was booming — in December “file inclusion” vulnerability had a bigger percentage.
Now it’s your turn: explore more
To explore data for 2021 (but also 2020), you can check out Cloudflare Radar’s Year In Review page. To go deep into any specific country with up-to-date data about current trends, start at Cloudflare Radar’s homepage.
So, if you like to keep up with the tradition in the United States you and your family yesterday (November 25, 2021) celebrated Thanksgiving. So on a special day, with family gatherings for many and with a lot of cooking if you’re into the tradition (roast turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie), it makes sense that different Internet patterns show up on Cloudflare Radar.
First, let’s look at shopping habits. After a busy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, online shopping paused for Thanksgiving Day and dipped at lunchtime. So in a very good week for e-Commerce, Thanksgiving was an exception, especially at the extended lunchtime.
Now, let’s focus on Internet traffic at the time of the Thanksgiving Dinner. First, what time is that? Every family is different, but a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.
Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic in the US increased this past seven days, compared with the previous period, and that makes sense given that it’s traditionally a good week for online shopping. But we can also see in the next chart that the time of Thanksgiving dinner in the continental US was a clear exception.
The circle in red in the chart clearly shows us that yesterday afternoon in the US the Internet traffic was a lot slower than the previous days at the same time and that’s more evident between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (we use that as a standard timezone in Radar). That time period is “translated” for the East Coast between 16:00 and 20:00 EST and for the West Coast the time between 13:00 to 17:00 PST.
Internet traffic is going up
We can also use Cloudflare Radar to see that in the last two weeks Internet traffic in the US has been increasing (compared with the same period of the previous month). In a time of the year when temperatures go down, Internet traffic was definitely going up. That’s more evident this week after Sunday, November 21.
The biggest spike of the last 30 days, so far (maybe today, Black Friday, November 26, will change that — you can see the live trends using Radar), was definitely in the evening of Monday, November 22 (~02:00 UTC, November 23). This past Tuesday night, November 23, was the second day of the month with the highest traffic in the US, and the third day was actually the next day (Wednesday, November 24).
We can also see on Radar (represented in the next chart) that after several days of the Internet traffic peaks being reached at around 02:00 UTC (which “translates” to 21:00 EST and 18:00 PST), this Thanksgiving Day it was reached later, at about 03:00 UTC (22:00 EST and 19:00 PST).
Mobile traffic goes up in the busiest online week of the month
Another interesting trend regarding Thanksgiving week in the US is how there are more people this week using mobile devices to access the Internet than in the previous weeks.
Yesterday, November 25, mobile traffic represented 54% of the Internet traffic in the US. That’s 8% more than the usual 46% of mobile traffic percentage in the US that we registered in the last 30 days — in the last seven days that number goes up to 49%.
We can actually see this more clearly when we only focus on mobile traffic. This past Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, the mobile traffic percentage in the US increased by about 6% compared to the previous week:
Conclusion
When we announced Cloudflare Radar, back in September 2020, we explained how Internet use follows patterns that humans create. Throughout the pandemic we saw different trends caused by people being more at home than usual, but Internet patterns also change at specific times of the year (like when students go back to school or when it’s colder outside) or on some holidays like Thanksgiving.
Like we saw in the US yesterday, a holiday can affect Internet traffic as a whole, but also the time of the day we are online most, the devices we use to access the Internet and the types of websites we visit (e-commerce websites are getting an increase in traffic this week).
And remember: you can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see Internet traffic globally and in every country.
For many (especially in the Northern Hemisphere, where about 87% of humans live), September is the “get back to school” (or work) month after a summer break and that also reflects changes in the Internet traffic, particularly in mobile usage.
Looking at our data (you can see many of these insights in Cloudflare Radar) there’s a global trend: mobile traffic lost importance (compared with desktop traffic) in September. The next chart shows there was less percentage of Internet traffic from mobile devices after Monday, September 6, 2021, with a difference of -2% in some days, compared with the previous four weeks (August), and in late September it’s more than -3%.
We can also see that the percentage of desktop traffic increased in September compared to August (we compare here to complete weeks between both months because there are significant differences between weekdays and weekends).
A few of weeks ago, we saw there are considerable differences between countries regarding the importance of mobile usage. Getting back to work (or office hours) usually means an increase in desktop traffic. In that blog we highlighted the advantages that mobile devices brought to developing countries — many had their first contact with the Internet via a smartphone.
Different calendars to consider
Looking at September 2021, those shifts in Internet trends are more dependent on countries that start their school period at this time of the year and also there are the COVID lockdowns effects (more limited this year) to consider.
In the Northern Hemisphere, many countries start school in September after a break during the summer.
Europe: Back to school brings less time to be mobile
Europe is mostly coherent, and it is easier to check for mobile traffic patterns there. Most countries start school in the first 14 days of September, although Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark start in late August (like some states in the US, for example).
There are some countries in Europe where the mobile traffic went down in September more clearly (the overall picture in the continent is similar to the worldwide situation we described). Poland, Malta, Portugal, Italy, Spain registered a drop in specific periods of a few days in September of more than 5% in the mobile traffic percentage of the total Internet traffic.
Let’s ‘travel’ to Spain, a country where mobile traffic usually represents 45% of Internet traffic (in August this number was higher). Spanish schools officially opened for the new school year on Monday, September 6, and mobile traffic percentage lost more than 5% of its importance in some days of that week, a trend that grew the following week.
Portugal: A public holiday makes mobile usage go up
Portugal shows the same trend as other European countries but as shown in the following chart there was an apparent increase in mobile traffic percentage on October 5, 2021.
That Tuesday, Cloudflare’s Lisbon office was closed; the same happened across the country because it happens to be a public holiday, Republic Day. With most people not having to work in the middle of the week, the percentage of mobile traffic has risen (most visible at 19:00 local time).
Downs and ups
In Italy, we can see the same pattern, and it was also in the second week of school that mobile traffic percentage went down up to 8%. But by the end of September, it began to normalise to the values of the end of August.
The trend of mobile traffic going back to having the same level as late August is more clear in the Netherlands.
Japan, where the school year starts in April, but there’s a summer break through July and August (this year there were changes related to COVID), also shows the same trend of a decrease in mobile traffic that we saw in the Netherlands after school returned on September 6, 2021.
US: Start of the school year influenced by COVID
The United States had an atypical start of the school year because of COVID. Many states pushed the return to school from August to September (New York City started on September 13), and there were several schools with online classes because of the pandemic, but there’s also a drop in mobile traffic percentage, especially after Monday, September 6.
Further north of the continent, Canada (the school year officially started on September 1) saw mobile traffic lose more of its importance after September 6, a trend that grew by the end of the month.
China saw a decrease in mobile traffic percentage right away in the beginning of September (when the school year started), but mobile recovered in the last week of the month.
Russia with different patterns
Then there are countries with trends that go the other way around. Russia saw an increase (and not a decrease like in most countries of the Northern Hemisphere) in mobile traffic percentage a few days before the school year. But news reports show that many schools were closed because of COVID and only started to open by September 20 (the next chart shows precisely a decrease of mobile traffic percentage in that week.
The same trend is observed in Cyprus — the only EU country where mobile traffic percentage increases after the first week of school. That could be related with some school closures in the past few weeks COVID related.
Nigeria: COVID impact
When we go to Africa, Nigeria is just above the Earth’s equator line and is the most populous country on the continent (population: 206 million), and the school year was officially scheduled to start on September 13. But reports from UNICEF show that school reopening was postponed a few weeks because of the pandemic situation in Nigeria.
This seems to go along the same lines as our data shows: mobile traffic percentage grew on the week of September 13 and only started to come down by the end of September and the beginning of October.
Conclusion: September, September, the back to school/work centre
September brings shifts in the Internet traffic trends that seem to have an impact on the way people access the Internet and that goes beyond mobile usage, we can also see that worldwide: the Internet traffic percentage grew significantly — some days more than 10% — in September compared to August (like the graph shows).
It’s not that surprising when you realise that most people on Earth live in the Northern Hemisphere, where August is a summer and vacation month for many – although countries like India have the rainy monsoon season in August and Mid-September before autumn, for example. So September is not only the month wherein some countries students go back to school, but also when many go back to work.
It’s not every day that there is no Internet access in an entire country. In the case of Sudan, it has been five days without Internet after political turmoil that started last Monday, October 25, 2021 (as we described).
The outage continues with almost a flat line and just a trickle of Internet traffic from Sudan. Cloudflare Radar shows that the Internet in Sudan is still almost completely cut off.
There was a blip of traffic on Tuesday at ~14:00 UTC, for about one hour, but it flattened out again, and it continues like that — anyone can track the evolution on the Sudan page of Cloudflare Radar.
Internet shutdowns are not that rare
Internet disruptions, including shutdowns and social media restrictions, are common occurrences in some countries and Sudan is one where this happens more frequently than most countries according to Human Rights Watch. In our June blog, we talked about Sudan when the country decided to shut down the Internet to prevent cheating in exams, but there were situations in the past more similar to this days-long shutdown — something that usually happens when there’s political unrest.
The country’s longest recorded network disruption was back in 2018, when Sudanese authorities cut off access to social media (and messaging apps like WhatsApp) for 68 consecutive days from December 21, 2018 to February 26, 2019. There was a full mobile Internet shutdown reported from June 3 to July 9, 2019 that lasted 36 days.
You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see the Internet traffic globally and in every country.
Today, October 25, following political turmoil, Sudan woke up without Internet access.
In our June blog, we talked about Sudan when the country decided to shut down the Internet to prevent cheating in exams.
Now, the disruption seems to be for other reasons. AP is reporting that “military forces … detained at least five senior Sudanese government figures.”. This afternoon (UTC) several media outlets confirmed that Sudan’s military dissolved the transitional government in a coup that shut down mobile phone networks and Internet access.
Cloudflare Radar allows anyone to track Internet traffic patterns around the world. The dedicated page for Sudan clearly shows that this Monday, when the country was waking up, the Internet traffic went down and continued that trend through the afternoon (16:00 local time, 14:00 UTC).
We dug in a little more on the HTTP traffic data. It usually starts increasing after 06:00 local time (04:00 UTC). But this Monday morning, traffic was flat, and the trend continued in the afternoon (there were no signs of the Internet coming back at 18:00 local time).
When comparing today with the last seven days’ pattern, we see that today’s drop is abrupt and unusual.
We can see the same pattern when looking at HTTP traffic by ASN (Autonomous Systems Number). The shutdown affects all the major ISPs from Sudan.
Two weeks ago, we compared mobile traffic worldwide using Cloudflare Radar, and Sudan was one of the most mobile-friendly countries on the planet, with 83% of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices. Today, both mobile and desktop traffic was disrupted.
Using Cloudflare Radar, we can also see a change in Layer 3&4 DDoS attacks because of the lack of data.
You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see the Internet traffic globally and in every country.
You’re having dinner, you look at the table next to and everyone is checking their phone, scrolling and browsing and interacting with that little (is getting bigger) piece of hardware that puts you in contact with friends, family, work and the giant public square of sorts that social media has become. That could happen in the car (hopefully with the passengers, never the driver), at home when you’re on the sofa, in bed or even when you’re commuting or just bored in line for the groceries.
Or perhaps you use your mobile phone as your only connection to the Internet. It might be your one means of communication and doing business. For many, the mobile Internet opened up access and opportunity that simply was not possible before.
Around the world the use of mobile Internet differs widely. In some countries mobile traffic dominates, in others desktop still reigns supreme.
Mobile Internet traffic has changed the way we relate to the online world — work (once, for some, done on desktop/laptop computers) is just one part of it — and Cloudflare Radar can help us get a better understanding of global Internet traffic but also access regional trends, and monitor emerging security threats. So let’s dig into the mobile traffic trends, starting with a kind of contest (the data reflected here is from the 30 days before October 4).
In this area of Cloudflare Radar users can check the mobile traffic trends by country or worldwide (the case shown here) in the past 7 or 30 days. Worldwide we can see that mobile wins over desktop traffic with 52%
The country that has the greatest proportion of mobile Internet traffic is…
Cloudflare Radar has information on countries across the world, so we looked for, in the past month, the country with the highest proportion of mobile Internet traffic. And the answer is… Sudan, with 83% of Internet traffic is done using mobile devices — actually it’s a tie with Yemen, which we talk about a little further below.
In many emerging economies (Sudan is one), a large percent of the population had its first contact with the Internet through a smartphone. In these countries it is normal not to have a computer and some even got their first bank account thanks to the mobile device.
How about Sudan’s neighbours? South Sudan follows that pattern and mobile traffic represents 74% of Internet use. The same in Chad (74%), Libya (75%), Egypt (68%), Eritrea (67%) and Ethiopia (58%). It’s a clear trend throughout Africa, especially in the central and eastern part of the continent, where mobile traffic wins in every country (for the past 30 days).
World map that shows (in yellow) the areas of the planet where most of the Internet traffic is done via mobile devices. Africa, the Middle East and Asia have the highest percentage of mobile traffic.
The Vatican goes for the desktop experience (but Italy loves mobile)
On the other hand, the country we found with the least mobile traffic in the past 30 days is… Vatican City, with only 13% (since the Vatican is literally inside Rome this might be an anomaly caused by mobile devices inside the Vatican connecting to Italian networks). Small countries like Seychelles (29%), Andorra (29%), Estonia (34%) and San Marino (36%) have the same pattern — also with a low mobile traffic percentage there’s Madagascar (27%), Haiti (34%) and Greenland (37%).
We can also see that the pattern inside Vatican City differs greatly from the pattern in Italy. Italy is one of the most mobile-friendly European countries — Italians seem to prefer mobile to desktop. About 57% of Internet traffic is via mobile devices. Italy is only matched, in Europe, by its neighbour Croatia — on the other side of the Adriatic Sea — that in the past month has had 58% mobile traffic.
European countries have differing mobile preferences
While we’re talking about Italy and Croatia, let’s dig a bit more into Europe. Only six countries have more mobile than desktop (laptops included) traffic. Besides Italy and Croatia, there’s Romania (54%), Slovakia (52%) and Greece (51%) — all more to the east of Europe.
At the end of this mobile ranking we have one of the most digitally advanced countries in the world: Estonia (a truly digital society, according to Wired). The small country only has 34% of mobile traffic. Other countries in the north of Europe like Denmark (38%) and Finland (39%) follow the same trend.
Spain (47%), France (48%) and Ireland (49%) are getting close to being mobile-first countries. The UK (50%) has the same trend as its neighbours — Russia is actually in the same ‘neighbourhood’ (with 49%). On the other hand, Portugal (42%), Netherlands (43%) or Germany (44%) are still a little far.
How about the American continent?
Peru seems to be the country in the American continent that has less mobile use (36%), only compared with Canada (38%). Cuba is the country with more mobile use (70%)
Peru (36%) and Canada (38%) have in common that both are the countries in the American continent with the least mobile use in the past 30 days.
Then there’s Brazil (50%), Mexico (52%) — Chile is not far, with 48% of mobile use. Cuba takes the crown, with 70%, followed by the Dominican Republic (56%), Puerto Rico (51%) and Jamaica (51%), all Caribbean countries. The exception is Haiti, the least mobile of the continent, with 34% of mobile use.
Let’s go to the Middle East: the champion of mobile traffic
Most Internet traffic in Yemen is done with mobile devices like this chart from Radar of the previous 30 days shows
In this part of our planet there are no doubts whatsoever: mobile traffic rules completely. On the top of the list is Yemen, with the same 83% of mobile traffic as Sudan (that we talked about before). But Syria is actually a close second, with 82%.
Iran (71%), Iraq (70%), Pakistan (70%) and Egypt (69%) show the same trend. The exception, here, is the United Arab Emirates, with 44% of mobile traffic, and also Israel (45%). Nearby, Saudi Arabia (the country with the highest GDP in the region) is at 55%.
A (mobile) giant called India
Of the top 10 most populated countries, the clear winner of our mobile ranking is, without any doubt, India, with 80% mobile use. The country of 1.3 billion people surpasses the biggest country on the planet, China (1.4 billion live there), with 65% mobile.
Also in Asia, the fourth-biggest country in the world (after the US), Indonesia, has 68% of traffic by mobile devices. The same trend of mobile-first is followed by Thailand (65%), Vietnam (64%), Malaysia (64%), South Korea (56%), Japan (56%) and the Philippines (51%). Singapore is in the middle and down under, Australia is desktop first (37% mobile traffic), just like its neighbour New Zealand (38%).
Just as a curiosity, Vanuatu, the South Pacific Ocean nation (population of 307,150), ranked some years as the happiest nation on the planet (by the Happy Planet Index) has 52% of mobile traffic. The current number one in that same index, Costa Rica, is at 50%.
Conclusion
Mobile devices are here to stay and have become already a bridge to help bring more humans to the vast opportunities that the Internet brings. Of the top 15 countries with more mobile Internet traffic, there’s just one that is in the top 15 in terms of GDP, India.
As we already showed, there is a world of trends and even human habits (differing from country to country) to discover on our Cloudflare Radar platform. It’s all a matter of asking a question that could be reflected in our data and searching for the answers.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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