AI, DDoS, and the Internet in 2025 | Cloudflare Radar Year in Review

Cloudflare

Dec 19, 2025

#ThisWeekinNET — Episode 114

In this special Year in Review episode of This Week in NET, host João Tomé is joined by David Belson to break down the Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review.
Together, they explore what Cloudflare’s global network reveals about how the Internet evolved over the past year — from the rapid rise of AI crawlers and agent traffic, to record-breaking DDoS attacks, the spread of post-quantum encryption, and the growing impact of government-directed shutdowns and outages.
The conversation looks at Internet resilience, security trends, and performance across countries, as well as what changed in Internet services, mobile platforms, and connectivity in 2025, and what these signals might tell us about 2026.

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⏱️ Timestamps

02:44 — AI metrics: Crawling activity and “referral ratios”

04:57 — robots.txt: How site owners are fighting back against bots

07:26 — Training vs. search: The dominant purposes of AI bots

10:48 — iOS vs. Android: Global prevalence and GDP correlation

12:49 — Year-over-year view: Comparing 2024 vs. 2025 and new language support

13:28 — Detecting outages: Portugal and Spain as a real-world example

14:48 — Internet services: Generative AI and social media rankings

16:33 — Starlink growth: The “hockey stick” effect across 20+ countries

19:57 — Post-quantum encryption: Reaching 50% of human traffic

22:42 — 174 major outages: Government shutdowns and cable cuts