Global traffic grew sharply in 2024, and Yandex became the second most popular search engine on Earth – year results from Cloudflare

In 2024, global internet traffic has increased significantly. Cloudflare has published its annual report, in which it analyzed changes in the preferences and habits of Internet users from around the world regarding platforms, instant messengers and devices used.

Image source: Albert Stoynov / Unsplash

According to the report, Google maintained its position as the most popular Internet service overall. OpenAI remained the leader in the Generative AI category. Binance remained in the leading position in the Cryptocurrency category, while WhatsApp leads as a messaging platform. We also note here that Telegram has become the third most popular messenger all over the world, surpassing, for example, Viber and WeChat. Facebook✴ is still the most visited social network, and YouTube is the most popular video platform.

Yandex also showed up in the statistics – its search engine turned out to be the second most popular in the world after Google. True, their shares are incomparably different: Google controls 88.5% of global search, and Yandex controls only 3.1%. And “Yandex Browser” turned out to be the third most popular browser on Android – with a share of 1.4%. Google Chrome is the leader among browsers – 65.8% of the entire market.

While the fact that people are spending a lot of time online is not news, Cloudflare has released statistics showing the incredible growth of global internet traffic. “Despite minor declines in late February and the summer, the most recent quarter saw a sharp uptick in traffic,” the report said. As of the end of November, total annual traffic was up 17.2%. However, this increase is not evenly distributed. For example, in Guinea the increase was a whopping 350%, PCWorld notes.

In almost 100 regions, the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices, and globally the figure is 41.3%. Of these, almost a third are Apple iOS devices. Android accounts for more than 90% of traffic in 29 regions. At the same time, the peak share of iOS mobile device traffic is more than 60% in eight regions.

The Cloudflare report contains other interesting metrics. In particular, in 2024, 225 major Internet outages were recorded around the world. Cloudflare’s security systems neutralized 6.5% of global traffic that was identified as potentially dangerous. In the US, the figure rose to 5.1%, while in South Korea it fell slightly to 8.1%. In 44 countries, more than 10% of traffic was neutralized. It was also recorded that globally, gambling became the most attacked industry, slightly ahead of the most affected industry in 2023 – finance.

The report data indicates another interesting fact. The development and availability of satellite Internet is rapidly gaining popularity in different regions of the world. In particular, Starlink’s global traffic grew by more than 330% in 2024, including the launch of service in Malawi, South Africa in July 2023. Starlink traffic from this country increased 38 times in 2024.