Starlink broadband skyrockets as internet gets fundamentally rewired

Nobody would be surprised to learn that 2025 saw a continued increase in communications traffic, but the sixth version of the Cloudflare radar year in review has revealed the massive extent of this uptake and its changing nature, with satellite communications displaying particular strong growth.

The report was based on views of Cloudflare’s global network, which has a presence in 330 cities in over 125 countries and regions, handling over 81 million HTTP requests per second on average, with more than 129 million HTTP requests per second at peak on behalf of millions of customer web properties, in addition to responding to approximately 67 million DNS queries per second.

Cloudflare Radar also uses the data generated by these web and DNS services, combined with other data sets, to provide near-real-time insights into traffic, bots, security, connectivity, and DNS patterns and trends observed across the internet.

Among its headline findings, the study found that global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with significant growth starting in August. The top 10 most popular internet services saw a few year-over-year shifts, while a number of new entrants landed on category lists.

Drilling deeper into the traffic stats, Cloudflare said growth in 2025 appeared to occur in several phases. Traffic was, on average, somewhat flat through mid-April, generally within a couple of percent of the baseline value. However, the study revealed that it then saw growth through May to approximately 5% above baseline, staying in the +4–7% range through mid-August. It was at that time that growth accelerated, climbing steadily through September, October and November, peaking at 19% growth for the year.

Aided by a late-November increase, 2025’s rate of growth was about 10% higher than the 17% growth observed in 2024. Cloudflare noted that in past years, it had also observed traffic growth accelerating in the back-half of the year, although in 2022–2024, that acceleration started in July. The analyst conceded that it was still not clear why this year’s growth was seemingly delayed by several weeks.

Starlink connectivity doubled in 2025, including traffic from over 20 new countries and regions. The study analysed aggregate request traffic volumes associated with Starlink’s primary autonomous system (AS14593) to track the growth in usage of the service throughout 2025. The request volume shown in the study found traffic from Starlink continued to see consistent growth throughout 2025, with total request volume up 2.3x across the year. Cloudflare said it tended to see rapid traffic growth when Starlink service becomes available in a country or region, and that trend continued in 2025.

Turning its attention to connectivity, the study showed almost half of the 174 major internet outages observed around the world in 2025 were due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of internet connectivity. Cloudflare said internet outages continued to be an ever-present threat, and the potential impact of these outages continues to grow, as they can lead to economic losses, disrupted educational and government services, and limited communications.

During 2025, the study said it had covered significant internet disruptions. Cable cuts, affecting both submarine and domestic fibre optic infrastructure, were also a leading cause of internet disruptions in 2025.

Commenting on the data and trends revealed, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said: “The internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI [artificial intelligence], to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, every day is different. While we celebrated several internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what ‘scale’ means and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges.”