Cloudflare RadarYear in Review 2024for Mexico

Internet connectivity is critically important to everyday communication, commerce, entertainment, and transportation. Our ongoing reliance on the Internet is reflected in continued global Internet traffic growth.

This trend line starts mid-January, allowing for Internet activity to normalize following the return to work and school after the New Year.

Generative AI continued its meteoric rise in 2024, as new tools and services were launched on a regular basis, while the Metaverse seemed to recede into the background. Our category-specific lists represent the zeitgeist of Internet activity throughout the year, and include both familiar and unexpected names. Overall, Google maintained its position from 2023's ranking and was once again the most popular Internet service.

The ranking methodology used here is based on aggregate data from 1.1.1.1.

SpaceX Starlink continues to bring satellite Internet connectivity in previously underserved or unserved locations. We analyzed aggregate Cloudflare traffic volumes associated with the service's autonomous system (AS14593) during 2024.

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. Comparative trend lines are scaled relative to the Max value shown.

A Hilbert curve has unique visualization properties that make it useful for surveying 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 December 1, 2024, 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.

Post-quantum refers to a new set of cryptographic techniques that can protect data from adversaries with the ability to capture and store today's data for decryption by sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future. The Cloudflare Research team has been exploring post-quantum cryptography since 2017.

In October 2022, we enabled post-quantum key agreement on our network by default, but use of it requires that the browser support it as well. Google's Chrome 124 enabled it by default this year, starting on April 17, and adoption grew rapidly following that release, including Chrome derivatives. Other browsers are on path as well: Mozilla Firefox has started rolling out post-quantum by default, and we observed Apple Safari starting initial testing.

Apple's iOS and Google's Android remain the two most widely used mobile device operating systems. However, adoption varies significantly around the world -- Peak Android traffic share is over 95%, while peak iOS traffic share is around 66%.

Here we look at the distribution of iOS and Android across traffic seen by Cloudflare in Mexico during 2024. Traffic from other mobile operating systems was negligible and is not included in this graph.

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 2023, 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 Mexico during 2024.

Protecting and accelerating websites and applications for millions of customers, Cloudflare is in a unique position to measure search engine market share data. Our methodology uses the Referer header to identify the search engine sending traffic to customer sites and applications. Search engine market share data is presented as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system.

For additional details, please refer to the quarterly Search Engine Referral Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

Protecting and accelerating websites and applications for millions of customers, Cloudflare is in a unique position to measure browser market share. Our methodology uses information from the User Agent and Client-Hints headers to identify the browser making content requests, along with the associated operating system. Browser market share data is presented as an overall aggregate, as well as broken out by device type and operating system.

For additional details, please refer to the quarterly Browser Market Share Reports on Cloudflare Radar.

The Internet plays an increasingly significant role in people's lives, but not everyone has reliable Internet access. Outages can result from events like natural disasters and cable cuts, or can occur when a government deliberately shuts down Internet connectivity.

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

Cloudflare has long advocated for IPv6 adoption since 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 2024 to calculate aggregate IPv6 adoption rates at a 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 measurements from speed.cloudflare.com tests taken by users in Mexico throughout 2024.

In 2024, it is estimated that 70% of the world's population uses a smartphone, and in many countries, they are the primary means of Internet access.

This year, we found that nearly 100 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 from Mexico during 2024.

TCP anomalies include DoS attacks, network scanning, third-party connection tampering, client disconnects, and more.

Here we show the global rates of TCP connection anomalies for 2024, grouped by how far the connection progressed before the anomaly occurred. Post-SYN anomalies, which occur immediately after Cloudflare receives a SYN packet to open a new connection, were especially prominent throughout the year, and can often be explained by large-scale SYN flood attacks.

See our blog for a detailed guide on using the dataset and a primer on connection tampering.

Customers may choose to mitigate 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 knock an unprotected web site offline or attempt to steal customer data.

Here we show the percentage of traffic from Mexico mitigated by Cloudflare on a daily basis during 2024, 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 2024 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 Mexico that is targeting each category, calculated on a weekly basis. The default view shows the summary for the year.

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.

Over the course of 2024, the global share of RPKI valid IPv4 routes grew to 49.8%, up 6.4 percentage points from 2023.

The trends presented are based on routes announced by autonomous systems in Mexico.