An outage at one of the largest ISPs in Canada, Rogers Communications, started earlier today, July 8, 2022, and is ongoing (eight hours and counting), and is impacting businesses and consumers. At the time of writing, we are seeing a very small amount of traffic from Rogers, but we are only seeing residual traffic, and nothing close to a full recovery to normal traffic levels.
Based on what we’re seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely to be an internal error, not a cyber attack.
Cloudflare Radar shows a near complete loss of traffic from Roger’s ASN, AS812, that started around 08:45 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC).
What happened?
Cloudflare data shows that there was a clear spike in BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates after 08:15, reaching its peak at 08:45.
BGP is a mechanism to exchange routing information between networks on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver each network packet to its final destination. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn’t know what to do, and the Internet wouldn’t exist.
The Internet is literally a network of networks, or for the maths fans, a graph, with each individual network a node in it, and the edges representing the interconnections. All of this is bound together by BGP. BGP allows one network (say Rogers) to advertise its presence to other networks that form the Internet. Rogers is not advertising its presence, so other networks can’t find Roger’s network and so it is unavailable.
A BGP update message informs a router of changes made to a prefix (a group of IP addresses) advertisement or entirely withdraws the prefix. In this next chart, we can see that at 08:45 there was a withdrawal of prefixes from Roger’s ASN.
Since then, at 14:30, attempts seem to be made to advertise their prefixes again. This maps to us seeing a slow increase in traffic again from Rogers’ end users.
The graph below, which shows the prefixes we were receiving from Rogers in Toronto, clearly shows the withdrawal of prefixes around 08:45, and the slow start in recovery at 14:30, with another round of withdraws at around 15:45.
Outages happen more regularly than people think. This week we did an Internet disruptions overview for Q2 2022 where you can get a better sense of that, and on how collaborative and interconnected the Internet (the network of networks) is. And not so long ago Facebook had an hours long outage where BGP updates showed Facebook itself disappearing from the Internet.
Follow @CloudflareRadar on Twitter for updates on Internet disruptions as they occur, and find up-to-date information on Internet trends using Cloudflare Radar.
“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.
The Eurovision Song Contest has a history that goes back to 1956, so it’s even older than the European Union and one of its highlights over the years was being the first global stage for the Swedish group ABBA — Waterloo won the 1974 edition). This year, for the 66th edition, we have a dedicated page for Eurovision fans, journalists or anyone interested in following Internet trends related to the event taking place in Turin, Italy.
The contest consists of two semi-finals and a final. The first semi-final is today, May 10, at 21:00 CEST, the second is Thursday, May 12, at 21:00 CEST. And the final is on Saturday, May 14, at 21:00 CEST. We are using Central European Summer Time and not our usual (on Radar) UTC because that’s the timezone of most of the 40 countries that will take part in the contest. There will be 17 countries in the first semi-final, 18 in the second, and 25 in the final (the full list is here).
From countries to fan sites.
First, you can see the Internet traffic aggregate in all the 40 countries that are participating in Eurovision 2022. There’s also a toggle to choose each of the 40 countries regarding Internet traffic. If you pass the mouse over the traffic line, the traffic level hour by hour is also highlighted.
Then, we use DNS name resolution data to estimate traffic from the 40 participating countries to several types of websites. We have a video platforms chart as Eurovision has content on major video platforms. The baseline for the values we use is the average of the previous week, represented in the charts.
We also show social media trends in the participating countries, by hour, to see if the Eurovision semi-finals and final cause a change.
The contest has a large base of fan websites (there’s even the OGAE, General Organisation of Eurovision Fans), and we also have a chart for Eurovision fan sites. In this chart, yesterday at 20:00 CEST, traffic was already at its highest since May 1, with 6.22x more than the average of the previous week (that’s the baseline here).
Last, but not least, we also show the impact on national official broadcasters’ websites from the participating countries. For all the charts, there’s a download button to save the image file like this:
For this evening’s first semi-final, Portugal is participating and since we’re writing this blog post from our Lisbon office, I asked everyone’s favorite songs for the 2022 Eurovision edition. Norway’s song from Subwoolfer, Give That Wolf A Banana, was one of the favorites, followed by Portugal’s song from MARO, Saudade, Saudade.
The UK’s song from Sam Ryder, SPACE MAN, is automatically in Saturday’s final and was also praised at the Lisbon office, the same with France’s song from Alvan & Ahez, called Fulenn, where the group sings in their native language, Breton (from the French region of Brittany).
We blogged previously about some trends concerning the first round of the 2022 French presidential election, held on April 10. Here we take a look at the run-off election this Sunday, April 24, that ended up re-electing Emmanuel Macron as President of France.
First, the two main trends: French-language news sites outside France were clearly impacted by the local rule that states that exit polls can only be published after 20:00.
And Internet traffic was similar on both the election days (April 10 and 24) and that includes the increase in use of mobile devices and interest in news websites — there we also saw a clear interest in the Macron-Le Pen debate on April 20.
We have discussed before that election days usually don’t have a major impact on overall Internet traffic. Let’s compare April 10 with 24, the two Sundays when the elections were held. The trends throughout the day are incredibly similar (with a slight increase in traffic on April 24), even with a two-week gap between them.
Another election-day trend is the use of mobile devices to access the Internet, mainly at night. The largest spikes in number of requests made using mobile devices in France during April seemed to be all election-related:
#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 21:00 local time. 58% of traffic by mobile devices.
#2. April 24 (second round of the election), 22:00. 57% mobile traffic.
#3. April 20 (presidential debate), 22:00. 56% mobile traffic.
Not only did both the election Sundays (after the polling stations were closed) have an impact on mobile traffic in France, but the presidential debate (Wednesday, April 20) had the same type of impact, increasing requests from mobile devices.
The TV debate was seen by 15.6 million viewers in France and lasted between 21:00 and 22:45, local time; at the same time mobile traffic was higher than in any other Wednesday and was the #3 spike of April, with 10% more mobile requests than in the previous Wednesday at the same time.
The special case of French-language news sites
For the elections, local rules state that French media is barred from publishing partial results or polls of any kind until 20:00, the time when voting stations in metropolitan France officially close. So, that means that French news outlets have to wait for the allotted hour to give official projections.
Given that, we looked at French-language news websites from French-speaking countries like Switzerland and Belgium. They aren’t bound by French law and can show information about exit polls earlier (bear in mind that in most French cities polling stations close at 19:00 and only in the bigger cities does it go on until 20:00).
We can clearly see that requests to French-language news sites outside France clearly spiked earlier than those in France. News websites in France had spikes after 20:00 local time on both elections days, but Belgian and Swiss news sites had major increases in traffic at 19:00 on April 10 (1857% more than the previous Sunday!). For the runoff elections on April 24, the biggest spike of the month was at 18:00 (3100% more requests than the previous Sunday), but it was also higher than on previous days one hour later, at 19:00 (3080% higher).
There are no spikes at all related to the French debate (April 20), so that seems to show that those Belgian and Swiss news sites had a huge increase of French citizens eager to see the polls before 20:00.
Election results change online patterns
We saw two weeks ago that official election websites had a clear spike in requests on April 10, the first round of the elections. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.
Official French election-related websites had an increase in traffic throughout the week prior to the first round, after Monday, April 4, but it’s no surprise that the two major spikes were on both the elections’ day. How much? Here is the breakdown by bigger spikes in traffic:
#1. April 10 (first round of the election), 00:00 local time. 925% more requests than the previous Sunday (at the same time).
#2. April 24 (second round of the election), 20:00. 707% more requests.
#3. April 10 (first round of the election), 20:00. 370% more requests.
#3. April 11, 10:00. 115% more requests than the previous Monday.
(there’s a draw at these last two spikes)
News sites go up after polling stations close
Regarding the main French news websites, as we saw two weeks ago, 20:00 local time, after the polling stations are all closed, and the first major polls are revealed continues to be the time of the biggest spikes of the whole month.
The biggest spike of the month in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on April 10, the first round election day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday. And the second-biggest spike was the runoff election day, on April 24, at the same time (20:00 local time), with an increase of 142% in traffic compared to the previous Sunday at the same time.
Very close to those two spikes is Monday morning, April 11, after the first round of the elections. At 10:00 local time requests were 45% higher than in the previous Monday. The Macron-Le Pen debate on Wednesday, April 20, also had a spike. At 21:00, when it was starting, requests were 56% higher than on the previous Wednesday.
The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with a clear isolated spike on April 10 (the first round election day) at 20:00 local time, with a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced. Something similar, at the same time (20:00), on April 24, with a 375% increase in requests compared to the previous Sunday.
That’s only matched, again, by the April 20 debate. At 21:00 traffic was 308% higher than the previous Wednesday, so people were clearly taking notice of the debate and checking news outlets and TV station websites — there were French sites like france.tv that transmitted via streaming.
Conclusion
When people are really eager to see something as important as election results, they go and search where the first polls are (in this case, before 20:00 local time, they are outside France).
Also, in two different election moments in France separated by two weeks, there are clear similarities in Internet trends that show the way people use the Internet during election periods. That’s more clear when results start to arrive, but also a debate as important for a presidential election as the Le Pen-Macron one, also impacts not only the Internet traffic but also the attention to news and TV websites.
“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.
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.
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