A look at Internet traffic trends during Super Bowl LVIII

After winning Super Bowl LVII in 2023, the Kansas City Chiefs entered Super Bowl LVIII with an opportunity to pull off back-to-back wins, a feat last achieved by the New England Patriots two decades earlier, in 2003 and 2004. They faced the San Francisco 49ers, five-time Super Bowl champions, although their last win was nearly three decades ago, in 1995. The game started slowly, remaining scoreless until the start of the second quarter, after which both teams traded the lead until a tie score at the end of the game made it only the second Super Bowl to go into overtime. And if you weren’t watching it for the football, the advertisements certainly didn’t disappoint. And if you weren’t watching it for the football or the advertisements, but instead were waiting to see how many times CBS cut away to a shot of Taylor Swift during the game, the answer is… 16. (By my count, at least.)

In this blog post, we will explore which Super Bowl advertisements drove the largest spikes in traffic, as well as examine how traffic to food delivery services, social media, sports betting, and video platform websites and applications changed during the game. In Continue reading

Q4 2023 Internet disruption summary

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 310 cities in over 120 countries, where we interconnect with over 13,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions.

During previous quarters, we tracked a number of government directed Internet shutdowns in Iraq, intended to prevent cheating on academic exams. We expected to do so again during the fourth quarter, but there turned out to be no need to, as discussed below. While we didn’t see that set of expected shutdowns, we did observe a number of other Internet outages and disruptions due to a number of commonly seen causes, including fiber/cable issues, power outages, extreme weather, infrastructure maintenance, general technical problems, cyberattacks, and unfortunately, military action. As we have noted in the past, this post is intended as a summary overview of observed disruptions, and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter.

Government directed

Iraq

In a slight departure from the usual subject of Continue reading