The 25% rise of Global Internet Traffic for 2024
There are plenty of things we all become aware of that come as no surprise. Seeing ever greater parts of our lives moving into the digital realm is to be expected, and it’s increasingly common for people to be online because of their need for productivity rather than simply browsing the web for whatever it is that interests them. The growth of the Internet of Things is something that very much goes alongside all of this, and there are likely to be other major trends and developments in the future that will increase our reliance on the World Wide Web.
That’s something that is very relevant for us here at 4GoodHosting in the same way it would be for any good Canadian web hosting provider, and as this year comes close to ending it seems that Internet traffic has gone up quite considerably over the last 12 months. The 25% rise in global internet traffic definitely reflects an increased reliance on online services, and it’s also not surprising that Google retained its position as the most popular internet site. The other leaders were Facebook, Apple, and TikTok, and Instagram and Twitter/X also ranked high for where Internet users are spending most of their time.
Another noteworthy trend seen with Internet use over the year is the way financial organizations were prime targets for cyberattacks. The most common of these threats were deceptive links and extortion attempts in emails. The fact that were so many Internet outages - over 180 incidents worldwide – is something that is more of a problem because of the increased reliance we talked about earlier. There ere only 150 reported internet shutdowns in 2022, and it’s been reported that a lot of the increase is attributable to government-imposed shutdowns
Also not surprising is seeing that smartphones are the primary way people access the internet. In 2023 more than 40% of users who went on the Internet did so via a mobile device, and one-third of the with an Apple device. Another contributor in all of this is the way SpaceX Starlink is becoming increasingly available and those who are gaining Internet access where they live because of it are also pushing the Internet use numbers higher.
Generative AI a Major Contributor- to the rise of Global Internet Traffic
One standout trend that emerged globally in 2023 is Generative AI, something that really made an impression starting in November of last year with OpenAI's ChatGPT launch. From there OpenAI rose to prominence at the start of the year, as did other generative AI services like Character.ai, QuillBot, Hugging Face, Poe, Perplexity, Wordtune, Bard, ProWritingAid, and Voicemod.
The one internet service that did not have a good year is X, formerly Twitter. The service peaked at #8 in 2022 as the war in Ukraine began but then experienced a downturn in usage over this year. It started the year lower than in 2022, ranking between 12th and 16th for usage but currently it is 19th overall.
We mentioned Internet outages earlier in this entry, and they are proving to be a growing problem worldwide. The 180 reported this year is a new record, and the fact that so many are the result of government-mandated shutdowns is representative of a concerning trend that is very much connected to the idea and importance of freedom of information. Ones that occur for other reasons like cable cuts, natural disasters like storms and earthquakes and power outages are also problematic but don’t have such deep implications in the same way.
It is also fairly self-explanatory that security is also an ongoing concern for internet service providers. Most notable here is the exploit Log4j, a vulnerability first seen in December 2021 but another recently disclosed vulnerability is the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset that is being extremely problematic for a few months now and looks like it will be posing serious challenges for web security experts into 2024.
This emerging vulnerability has a large-scale impact, potentially affecting any organization using HTTP/2 for their websites and applications. Other common security issues that will continue to negatively affect internet service are ransomware, malware, and phishing attacks, all of which can be very disruptive for businesses in preventing them from being able to use the Internet as they need to.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content or data from scratch. For example, generative AI can produce images, text, music, code, or even new AI models. Generative AI uses different techniques and algorithms to learn from existing data and generate novel and realistic outputs. Some of the most popular generative AI methods are generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational auto encoders (VAEs), and transformers.
