How the 2026 World Cup affected Internet traffic

For 96 years, the World Cup has been a global phenomenon, uniting nations and communities through a shared love of sportsmanship. While its popularity is nothing new, what is novel today is how rare a truly collective global experience has become. In an era defined by microtrends and algorithmic bubbles, it is increasingly uncommon for people across most countries to engage in the exact same event. 

That is precisely the unifying power of the World Cup. Fans from all over the globe reshape their daily routines around these once-in-a-lifetime matchups and storylines — and because Cloudflare operates a global network with 330+ points of presence worldwide, we are in a unique position to see exactly how this global ritual reshaped the world’s online activity throughout June and July 2026. 

Cloudflare Radar tracks HTTP traffic, DNS, security, and more to highlight global Internet trends. In this blog post we’ll use that data to explore how the World Cup impacted global traffic patterns throughout the tournament’s run. 

How did the World Cup change our behavior online? 

To understand how traffic changes throughout a match, we had to establish what it is “normally.” One way to do this Continue reading

Measuring the Internet’s pulse: trending domains now on Cloudflare Radar

In 2022, we launched the Radar Domain Rankings, with top lists of the most popular domains based on how people use the Internet globally. The lists are calculated using a machine learning model that uses aggregated 1.1.1.1 resolver data that is anonymized in accordance with our privacy commitments. While the top 100 list is updated daily for each location, typically the first results of that list are stable over time, with the big names such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and TikTok leading. Additionally, these global big names appear for the majority of locations.

Today, we are improving our Domain Rankings page and adding Trending Domains lists. The new data shows which domains are currently experiencing an increase in popularity. Hence, while with the top popular domains we aim to show domains of broad appeal and of interest to many Internet users, with the trending domains we want to show domains that are generating a surge in interest.

How we generate the Trending Domains

When we started looking at the best way to generate a list of trending domains, we needed to answer the following questions:

• What type of popularity changes do we want to capture?
• What Continue reading