Year in Review 2023for Mexico

Internet connectivity is more important than ever, enabling everyday communication, commerce, entertainment, and transportation. This increasing reliance on the Internet is reflected in continued global Internet traffic growth, with some variability at the local level.

This trend line starts mid-January, allowing for Internet activity to normalize following the return to work and school after the New Year. 2022's trend line is shown for comparison purposes.

Apple's iOS and Google's Android are the two most widely used mobile device operating systems. However, adoption can vary significantly around the world, based in part on device availability, cost, and use case.

Here we look at the distribution of iOS and Android across traffic seen by Cloudflare from the selected country/region during 2023. Traffic from other mobile operating systems was negligible and is not included in this graph.

SpaceX Starlink promises satellite Internet connectivity in previously underserved or unserved locations. We analyzed aggregate Cloudflare traffic volumes associated with the service's autonomous system (AS14593) during 2023.

Graphs will not be displayed for locations where Cloudflare has not observed meaningful Starlink-related traffic.

The trend line is scaled relative to the actual traffic data, where Max is the peak observed request volume and 0 means no traffic was observed. 2022's trend line is shown for comparison purposes, and is scaled to the Max value across 2022 and 2023.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the core protocol that the web relies upon. HTTP/1.0 was first standardized in 1996, HTTP/1.1 in 1999, and HTTP/2 in 2015. The most recent version, HTTP/3, was completed in 2022, and runs on top of QUIC, a new transport protocol. Using QUIC allows it to mitigate the effects of packet loss, establish connections more quickly, and provide encryption by default.

Here we look at the distribution of HTTP versions across client traffic seen by Cloudflare from the selected country during 2023.

A Hilbert curve is what is known as a "continuous space filling curve", and has properties that make it useful for visualizing the Internet's IPv4 address space.

While Cloudflare Radar allows you to see Internet traffic at a country/region or autonomous system level, using a Hilbert curve, we can get a holistic look at where traffic is coming from across the entire (IPv4) Internet. The visualization below shows traffic to Cloudflare from January 1 to November 26, 2023, with IP addresses aggregated at a /20 level. That means that at the highest zoom level, each cell represents traffic from 4096 IPv4 addresses.

Zoom and drag to explore areas of interest on the plot.

The Internet plays an increasingly significant role in people's lives, but not everyone has reliable Internet access. Outages can be inadvertently caused by events like natural disasters or can occur when a government deliberately shuts down connectivity.

The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center tracks these Internet disruptions, and uses Cloudflare traffic data for insights into their scope and duration.

If the timeline is blank for the selected country/region, then Cloudflare did not observe outages there during 2023.

Cloudflare has been a vocal advocate for IPv6 adoption for many years because it plays a critical role in the scalability of the Internet. Because of the limited availability of IPv4 address space, some cloud providers have chosen to levy what is effectively an IPv4 tax for the use of IPv4 addresses. (Spoiler: Cloudflare can help customers avoid having to pay it.)

We analyzed requests for dual stacked content that were made over IPv6 during 2023 to calculate aggregate IPv6 adoption rates at a country/region level. Network-level IPv6 adoption rates can be found on Cloudflare Radar.

Although Internet connections are most often marketed and sold with a focus on download speed, upload speed is increasingly important as we spend more time using videoconferencing and livestreaming tools. Latency is also a critical component of Internet quality, as high latency can significantly impact Internet connection quality and the user experience.

Here we present a distribution of download speed, upload speed, idle latency, and loaded latency meaurements from speed.cloudflare.com tests taken by users in the selected country/region throughout 2023.

Mobile devices are ubiquitous, and in many countries, they are the primary way that people access the Internet, whether at work, at home, or on the go.

In 2023, we found that over 80 countries/regions had a majority of traffic from mobile devices.

Here we look at the distribution of mobile and desktop device usage across traffic seen by Cloudflare the selected country/region during 2023.

Customers may choose to mitigate (block) traffic for a variety of reasons, even if the traffic isn't suspected to be malicious. However, for malicious traffic, DDoS mitigation techniques and Web Application Firewall (WAF) Managed Rules are two of the most effective defences against Application Layer (Layer 7) attacks. These attacks can take an unprotected web site down for hours or steal customer data.

Here we show the percentage of traffic from the selected country/region mitigated by Cloudflare on a daily basis during 2023, as well as the percentage of traffic mitigated as a DDoS attack or by WAF Managed Rules.

Bot traffic describes any non-human Internet traffic, and monitoring bot levels can help spot potential malicious activities. Of course, bots can be helpful too, and Cloudflare maintains a list of verified bots to help keep the Internet healthy.

Looking at bot traffic observed by Cloudflare in 2023 at a country level, we found that there was significant variability in the concentration of bot activity by network.

While we can't predict which industry attackers will target the most, we do know all industries get attacked. No matter the industry, your best bet is to keep your guard up.

The bars represent the percentage of mitigated traffic from the selected country/region that is targeting each category, calculated on a weekly basis.

In August 2023, we published a blog post that explored traffic seen by Cloudflare for the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities of 2022. Although these are older vulnerabilities, attackers continued to actively target and exploit them throughout 2023.

Attack activity by vulnerability varied from country to country, and in some countries, attacks targeted only a subset of the vulnerabilities.

One important step towards improving Internet routing security has been the adoption of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), a cryptographic method of signing records that associate a BGP route announcement with the correct originating AS number. This enables network providers to validate BGP announcements and reject invalid routes.

The country/region-level trends presented are based on routes announced by autonomous systems associated with the selected country/region.

We use RIPE NCC's RPKI daily archive to reconstruct RPKI data snapshots, and use RIPE RIS rrc00 RIB dumps as the source of BGP routes.