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Cloudflare Radar was launched in September 2020, almost three years ago, when the pandemic was affecting Internet traffic usage. It is a free tool to show Internet usage patterns from both human and automated systems, as well as attack trends, top domains, and adoption and usage of browsers and protocols. As Cloudflare has been publishing data-driven insights related to the general Internet for more than 10 years now, Cloudflare Radar is a natural evolution.
This year, we have introduced several new features to Radar, also available through our public API, that enables deeper data exploration. We’ve also launched an Internet Quality section, a Trending Domains section, a URL Scanner tool, and a Routing section to track network interconnection, routing security, and observed routing anomalies.
In this reading list, we want to highlight some of those new additions, as well as some of the Internet disruptions and trends we’ve observed and published posts about during this year, including the war in Ukraine, the impact of Easter, and exam-related shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria.
We also encourage everyone to explore Cloudflare Radar and its new features, and to give you a partial review of the year, in terms of Internet insights — our 2023 Year in Review is coming later this year.
New additions to Cloudflare Radar
In 2022, Cloudflare Radar 2.0 was released last September, refreshing the look & feel and building on a new platform that allows us to easily add new features in the future. At that time, we added two new sections:
- Domain Rankings (“Goodbye, Alexa. Hello, Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings”), which includes worldwide and by country views of popular domains;
- The Outage Center (“The status page the Internet needs: Cloudflare Radar Outage Center”), which monitors observed Internet disruptions.
Cloudflare Radar’s 2022 Year in Review and the related blog were published at the end of the year.
Without further ado, here are some of the new features launched in 2023.
Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner (✍️)
If you’re invited to click on a link and if you’re unsure about its safety, or if you simply want to verify technical details about a particular site, URL Scanner is here to assist. Provide us with a URL, and our scanner will compile a report containing a myriad of technical details: risk assessment, SSL certificate data, HTTP request and response data, page performance data, DNS records, associated cookies, what technologies and libraries the page uses, and more.
Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page (✍️)
In June 2023, the new Internet Quality page was introduced to Cloudflare Radar, offering both country and network (autonomous system) level insight. This provides information on Internet connection performance (bandwidth) and quality (latency, jitter) over time based on benchmark test data as well as speed.cloudflare.com test results.
You can also see in a world map how the different countries compare with each other in different metrics from bandwidth to latency and jitter. Autonomous systems (AS) or networks are presented on individual pages, including Starlink’s AS14593. Latency is the metric that gives a better perspective on quality and improved Internet experience. Here’s the most recent global view on latency-based connection quality (lower is better):
Measuring the Internet’s pulse: trending domains now on Cloudflare Radar (✍️)
Starting July 2023, our Domain Rankings page received enhancements through the inclusion of specific Trending Domains lists. While the top 100 list is typically dominated by the big names such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, there are trending domains that also tell interesting and even more local stories.
The Trending Domains lists highlight surges in interest from the previous day and previous week. For instance, we captured how nba.com was trending in 28 locations during the NBA Draft 2023, and how rt.com (a Russian-based news site) gained attention in multiple countries during the Wagner group mutiny in Russia. More recently, on the same subject, after the death of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash, flightradar24.com was trending in our daily list both in Russia and Ukraine.
Routing information now on Cloudflare Radar (✍️)
The Internet is a vast, sprawling collection of networks (autonomous systems) that connect to each other, and routing is one of the most critical operations of the Internet. Launched in late July 2023, the new Cloudflare Radar Routing page examines the routing status of the Internet, including secure routing protocol deployment for a country and routing changes and anomalies. Included are routing security statistics, and also announced prefixes and connectivity insights. Why is that important? Routing decides how and where the Internet traffic should flow from the source to the destination, and deviations or anomalies can indicate potential issues that lead to connectivity disruptions.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is considered the postal service of the Internet, but as a routing protocol suffers from a number of security weaknesses. Within the Routing page, we also present BGP route leaks and BGP hijack detection results, highlighting relevant events detected for any given network or globally. Notably, BGP origin hijacks allow attackers to intercept, monitor, redirect, or drop traffic destined for the victim’s networks. In this related blog post, we also explain how Cloudflare built its BGP hijack detection system (including notifications), from its design and implementation to its integration: Cloudflare Radar’s new BGP origin hijack detection system.
General Internet insights from 2023
One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience (✍️)
This blog post details Internet insights during the war in Europe and discusses how Ukraine’s Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.
Cloudflare observed multiple Internet disruptions in the first weeks of the war (Internet infrastructure was damaged, and Internet access was limited in besieged areas, like Mariupol), as well as airstrikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. We also emphasize how application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 as compared to pre-war levels, the country’s Internet resilience during the war, and major growth in Starlink traffic from the country.
Cloudflare’s view of the Virgin Media outage in the UK (✍️)
At times, major Internet operators experience significant outages due to technical issues. In 2022, it was Canada’s Rogers that experienced a 17-hour disruption impacting millions of users, and in early April 2023, a similar incident occurred with the United Kingdom’s Virgin Media. In this case, there were two clear outages for a few hours during April 4, 2023.
The post examines the impact on Internet traffic, the availability of Virgin Media web properties, and how BGP activity offered insights into the root cause.
