2025 Global Internet Trends Revealed: Mobile Dominance, Security Threats, and Connectivity Insights

The digital ecosystem continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. With billions of devices connecting to the Internet daily, understanding traffic patterns, security threats, and connectivity quality has never been more critical. The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review provides a comprehensive snapshot of the Internet’s operational and security landscape over the past year, highlighting trends in device usage, protocols, bot activity, routing security, email threats, and more. This analysis consolidates key insights, offering actionable intelligence for network engineers, cybersecurity professionals, policymakers, and business leaders worldwide.

Global Mobile Device Traffic and Operating System Trends

Mobile devices are now central to Internet access, with 43% of global requests in 2025 originating from smartphones and tablets, up from 41% in 2024. In 117 countries and regions, more than half of requests came from mobile devices. African countries dominated mobile-first adoption, with Sudan and Malawi leading at 75% and 74%, respectively. Conversely, Gibraltar exhibited the lowest mobile traffic share at just 5.1%.

Globally, Apple’s iOS accounted for 35% of mobile traffic, a modest increase of two percentage points year-over-year, while Android devices continued to dominate, particularly in regions with cost-sensitive markets. Countries with significant iOS adoption included:

Android adoption surpassed 90% in 27 countries, with Papua New Guinea leading at 97%, followed by Sudan, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia at 95% or higher. Globally, Android accounted for over 50% of mobile traffic in 175 countries, illustrating the operating system’s widespread distribution across price points and form factors.

HTTP Protocol Adoption and Web Performance

The evolution of HTTP protocols continues to shape web performance and security. In 2025:

• HTTP/2 handled 50% of requests,

• HTTP/1.x accounted for 29%,

• HTTP/3 adoption reached 21%.

While adoption increases were incremental from 2024, HTTP/3 saw substantial geographic expansion. Fifteen countries exceeded a third of requests via HTTP/3, with Georgia reaching 38% adoption, slightly above the previous year’s top rate in Réunion. Armenia’s HTTP/3 adoption jumped from 25% to 37%, signaling regional acceleration.

Key Benefits of HTTP/3:

• Faster connection establishment via QUIC protocol

• Improved packet loss mitigation

• Default encryption enhancing security

Browser Market Share Across Platforms

Chrome remained the dominant browser globally in 2025, accounting for approximately two-thirds of all requests. Safari ranked second with a 15.4% share, followed by Microsoft Edge (7.4%), Mozilla Firefox (3.7%), and Samsung Internet (2.3%).

Platform-specific trends revealed:

• On iOS, Safari dominates with 79% share, four times greater than Chrome.

• On Android, Chrome leads with 85% share, while Samsung Internet accounts for 6.6%.

• On Windows desktops, Chrome maintains a 69% share, with Edge trailing at 19%.

In Russia, local browsers influence market dynamics: Yandex Browser captured 33% market share, briefly overtaking Chrome mid-year at 39%.

Analysis: Browser choice remains closely tied to default device configurations and regional preferences. Optimizing web content for Chrome and Safari remains essential for global accessibility.

Search Engine Market Share

Google reinforced its global dominance as the primary referrer of web traffic, responsible for nearly 90% of all search-originated requests. Secondary search engines, including Bing (3.1%), Yandex (2%), Baidu (1.4%), and DuckDuckGo (1.2%), captured far smaller shares.

Regional patterns diverged significantly:

• Yandex leads in Russia with a 65% domestic market share.

• In the Czech Republic, Seznam maintains a notable 7.7% share, despite Google’s 84% dominance.

• Desktop traffic shows Bing capturing 11% globally, reflecting Windows system integration.

These dynamics underscore the importance of regional SEO strategies and multi-engine optimization for enterprise digital presence.

Connectivity: Speed, Latency, and Outages

Cloudflare’s speed test data highlighted global connectivity patterns. London and Los Angeles emerged as activity hotspots, alongside Tokyo, Hong Kong, and several U.S. cities. Surges in test activity were observed in Nairobi (June 10), Tehran (July 29), Russia (August 5), and Karnataka, India (October 28). These spikes were not correlated with recorded Internet outages, suggesting proactive user testing behaviors.

Internet Quality Metrics (Average Mbps & Latency):

Nearly half of the 174 major Internet outages recorded in 2025 were government-directed shutdowns, often related to exam integrity or civil unrest, affecting countries such as Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. Cable cuts, hurricanes, and infrastructure failures also contributed to significant downtime.

Observation: Stable, low-latency connections are increasingly critical for gaming, videoconferencing, and enterprise applications. Policymakers and ISPs must prioritize redundancy and regional infrastructure resilience.

Security: Threats, Mitigations, and Routing Integrity

Cloudflare mitigated 6.2% of global traffic in 2025, with DDoS/WAF mitigations applied to 3.3%. Equatorial Guinea recorded the highest mitigated traffic at 40%, while Dominica experienced the lowest at 0.7%.

Bot Traffic:

• 40% originated from the United States

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud were responsible for a combined 24%

• Microsoft Azure contributed 5.5%

Targeted Vertical Analysis:

• “People and Society” organizations faced the highest mitigated traffic at 4.4%, experiencing surges up to 23.2% weekly.

• Gambling/Games declined to 2.6% of mitigated attacks, showing a 50% year-over-year drop.

Routing Security (RPKI Adoption):

• IPv4 valid routes: 53.9%

• IPv6 valid routes: 60.1%

• IPv4 address space covered: 48.5%

• IPv6 address space covered: 61.6%

Countries leading RPKI adoption included Barbados, Mali, Tajikistan, and Dominica, demonstrating significant improvements in routing integrity and Internet security resilience.

Hyper-Volumetric DDoS Attacks

Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, defined as Layer 3/4 attacks exceeding 1 Tbps or 1 Bpps, escalated in frequency and intensity:

• July 2025: >500 attacks, peak below 5 Tbps

• September 2025: Series of >20 Tbps attacks

• October 2025: Largest attack peaked at 29.7 Tbps

• November 2025: Peak Bpps attack reached 14 billion packets per second

Implication: These unprecedented attack sizes highlight the need for robust DDoS mitigation strategies, scalable cloud infrastructure, and multi-layered defense mechanisms.

Email Security: Malicious Messages and Threat Categories

Email remains a dominant enterprise communication channel, with 5.6% of messages analyzed by Cloudflare deemed malicious. Threat distribution included:

• Deceptive links: 52%

• Identity deception: 38%

• Brand impersonation: 32%

TLDs most exploited for malicious activity included .christmas (99.8%) and .lol (99.6%), followed by .cfd and .sbs with over 90% malicious share.

Analysis: Organizations must employ advanced email security solutions and educate end users to detect deceptive links and phishing attempts, particularly as AI-assisted attacks rise.

JavaScript, Web Technologies, and CMS Adoption

Modern web development continues to rely heavily on JavaScript frameworks and libraries:

• React remains the leading framework, twice as prevalent as Vue.js.

• jQuery remains widely deployed, 8x more than carousel-focused libraries like Slick.

• Backend technologies include PHP, Node.js, and Java, maintaining dominance over Python, Ruby, Perl, and C.

Content Management Systems (CMS) and marketing tools showed evolving adoption:

• WordPress remains the top CMS, though its share dropped to 47%.

• HubSpot and Marketo increased market penetration by 10% YoY.

• VWO led A/B testing tools, while Google Optimize saw a decline after sunset.

Strategic Insights for 2026

The 2025 Cloudflare Year in Review underscores several key takeaways for businesses, policymakers, and technical professionals:

1. Mobile-first strategies are essential, with Android dominating emerging markets and iOS maintaining strongholds in affluent regions.

2. HTTP/3 and protocol optimization will become standard to improve web performance and security.

3. Browser and search engine optimization must consider regional preferences for maximum digital reach.

4. Connectivity improvements, infrastructure redundancy, and IPv6 adoption are critical to minimizing latency and outage risk.

5. Security threats—from DDoS to email phishing—are growing in volume and complexity, necessitating proactive mitigation, routing security, and AI-assisted defenses.

Organizations looking to navigate these trends can benefit from the expertise and insights provided by the team at 1950.ai, led by thought leaders like Dr. Shahid Masood. Leveraging data-driven intelligence ensures informed decision-making in an increasingly interconnected and high-stakes Internet landscape.

Further Reading / External References

1. Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review – https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/