Google is the most popular Internet service in 2024 followed by Facebook, Apple and TikTok, as per Cloudflare’s fifth annual ‘Year in review’ report. While the top four were unchanged for the year, WhatsApp was the new entrant in the category.

The report also revealed that internet traffic increased globally by 17.2%. 

WhatsApp also ranked as the top messaging platform while Facebook was named the top social media site.

With regards to video streaming, unsurprisingly YouTube led the way. It was followed by Netflix and Twitch. 

The most popular gaming service of the year was Roblox. 

The study revealed that the gaming and gambling industries were the most targeted this year, overtaking the finance sector which topped the list in 2023. 

Key highlights from the report:

• Global Internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024.
• Codeium, Claude and CoPilot were new entrants to the top ten most popular generative AI services, while OpenAI held onto the number one position for the second year in a row.
• 6.5% of all global traffic mitigated as potentially malicious.
• 41.3% of global traffic comes from mobile devices.
• 225 major Internet disruptions were observed globally in 2024, with many due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of Internet connectivity. 
• Aggregated across 2024, 28.5% of IPv6-capable requests were made over IPv6. India and Malaysia were the strongest countries, at 68.9% and 59.6% IPv6 adoption respectively.
• Amazon Web Services was responsible for 12.7% of global bot traffic, and 7.8% came from Google.
• An average of 4.3% of emails were determined to be malicious in 2024. Deceptive links and identity deception were the two most common types of threats found in malicious email messages.

Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder, Cloudflare, said, “We rely on the Internet almost constantly, yet many still see it merely as a collection of web pages. But the Internet is everywhere, woven throughout almost all of the daily activities of modern life – how we interact and connect on social media, use our smart refrigerators and vacuums, travel from one place to another through rideshare apps, connect to our banks and more. All of these interactions we often take for granted, behind the scenes, are connected to the Internet in one way or another, with a huge percentage running through Cloudflare’s network every second of every day. And as one of the largest in the world, Cloudflare’s global network has an unmatched comprehensive view into usage and overall quality and connectivity across the web.”