This post is also available in 한국어, 日本語, Português. The 2023 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fourth annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed throughout the year at both a global and country/region level across a variety of metrics. Below, we present a summary of key findings, and then explore them in more detail in subsequent sections.

Throughout the year, special events lead to changes in Internet traffic. We observed this with Thanksgiving in the US last week, where traffic dipped, and during periods like Black Friday (November 24, 2023) and Cyber Monday (November 27, 2023), where traffic spiked. But how significant are these Cyber Week days on the Internet? Is it a global phenomenon? Does e-commerce interest peak on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and are attacks increasing during this time?

Thanksgiving is a tradition celebrated by millions of Americans across six time zones and 50 states, usually involving travel and bringing families together. This year, it was celebrated yesterday, on November 23, 2023. With the Internet so deeply enmeshed into our daily lives, anything that changes how so many people behave is going to also have an impact on online traffic. But how big an impact, exactly?

The basis of Zero Trust is defining granular controls and authorization policies per application, user, and device. Having a system with a sufficient level of granularity to do this is crucial to meet both regulatory and security requirements.

If you’re responsible for creating a Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule, you’ll almost certainly need to reference a large list of potential values that each field can have. And having to manually manage and enter all those fields, for numerous WAF rules, would be a guaranteed headache.

It's been two years since we announced Email Routing, our solution to create custom email addresses for your domains and route incoming emails to your preferred mailbox. Since then, the team has worked hard to evolve the product and add more powerful features to meet our users' expectations. Examples include Route to Workers, which allows you to process your Emails programmatically using Workers scripts, Public APIs, Audit Logs, or DMARC Management.

Welcome to the third DDoS threat report of 2023. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a type of cyber attack that aims to disrupt websites (and other types of Internet properties) to make them unavailable for legitimate users by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can handle — similar to a driver stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store.

On Wednesday, October 18, 2023, we discovered attacks on our system that we were able to trace back to Okta – threat actors were able to leverage an authentication token compromised at Okta to pivot into Cloudflare’s Okta instance. While this was a troubling security incident, our Security Incident Response Team’s (SIRT) real-time detection and prompt response enabled containment and minimized the impact to Cloudflare systems and data.