These changes in daily life are showing up as changes in patterns of Internet use around the world. In this blog post I take a look at changing patterns in northern Italy, South Korea and the Seattle area of Washington state.

To understand how Internet use is changing, it’s first helpful to start with what a normal pattern looks like. Here’s a chart of traffic from our Dallas point of presence in the middle of January 2020.

This is a pretty typical pattern. If you look carefully you can see that Internet use is down a little at the weekend and that Internet usage is diurnal: Internet use drops down during the night and then picks up again in the morning. The peaks occur at around 2100 local time and the troughs in the dead of night at around 0300. This sort of pattern repeats worldwide with the only real difference being whether a peak occurs in the early morning (at work) or evening (at home).

Now here’s Seattle in the first week of January this year. I’ve zoomed in to a single week so we see a little more of the bumpiness of traffic during the day but it’s pretty much the same story.

Now let’s zoom out to the time period January 15 to March 12. Here’s what the chart looks like for traffic coming from Cloudflare’s Seattle PoP over that period (the gaps in the chart are just missing data in the measurement tool I’m using).

Focus in on the beginning of the chart. Looks like the familiar diurnal pattern with quieter weekends. But around January 30 something changes. There’s a big spike of traffic and traffic stays elevated. The weekends aren’t so clear either. The first reported case of COVID-19 was on January 21 in the Seattle area.

Towards the end of February, the first deaths occurred in Washington state. In early March a small number of employees of Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon in the Seattle area were confirmed to be infected. At this point, employers began encouraging or requiring their staff to work from home. If you focus on the last part of the chart and compare it with the first two things stand out: Internet usage has grown greatly and the night time troughs are less evident. People seem to be using the Internet more and for more hours.

Throughout the period there are also days with double spikes of traffic. If I zoom into the period March 5 to March 12 it’s interesting to compare with the week in January above.

Firstly, traffic is up about 40% and nighttime troughs are now above the levels seen in January during the day. The traffic is also spiky and continues through the weekend at similar levels to the week.

Next we can zoom in on traffic to residential ISPs in the Seattle area. Here’s a chart showing the first three days of this week (March 9 to March 11) compared to Monday to Wednesday a month prior in early February (February 10 to February 12).

Traffic to residential ISPs appears to be up about 5% month on month during the work day. We might have expected this to be higher given the number of local companies asking employees to work from home but many appear to be using VPNs that route all Internet traffic back through the corporate gateway.

Turning to Italy, and in particular northern Italy, where there has been a serious outbreak of COVID-19 leading to first a local quarantine and then a national one. Most of the traffic in northern Italy is served from our Milan point of presence.

For reference here’s what traffic looked like the first week in January.

A familiar pattern with peak traffic typically in the evening. Here’s traffic for March 5 to 12.

Traffic has grown by more than 30% with Internet usage up at all hours of the day and night. Another change that’s a little harder to see is that traffic is ramping up earlier in the morning than in early January. In early January traffic started rising rapidly at 0900 UTC and reach the daytime plateaus you see above around 1400 UTC. In March, we see the traffic jump up more rapidly at 0900 UTC and reach a first plateau before tending to jump up again.

Drilling into the types of domains that Italians are accessing we see changes in how people are using the Internet. Online chat systems are up 1.3x to 3x of normal usage. Video streaming appears to have roughly doubled. People are accessing news and information websites about 30% to 60% more and online gaming is up about 20%.

One final look at northern Italy. Here’s the period that covers the introduction of the first cordon sanitaire in communes in the north.

The big spike of traffic is the evening of Monday, February 24 when the first cordons sanitaire came into full effect.

Here’s the normal traffic pattern in Seoul, South Korea using the first week of January as an example of what traffic looked like before the outbreak of COVID-19:

And here’s March 5 to 12 for comparison:

There’s no huge change in traffic patterns other than that Internet traffic seen by Cloudflare is up about 5%.

Digging into the websites and APIs that people are accessing in South Korea shows some significant changes: traffic to websites offering anime streaming up over 2x, online chat up 1.2x to 1.8x and online gaming up about 30%.

In both northern Italy and South Korea traffic associated with fitness trackers is down, perhaps reflecting that people are unable to take part in their usual exercise, sports and fitness activities.

Cloudflare is watching carefully as Internet traffic patterns around the world alter as people alter their daily lives through home-working, cordon sanitaire, and social distancing. None of these traffic changes raise any concern for us. Cloudflare's network is well provisioned to handle significant spikes in traffic. We have not seen, and do not anticipate, any impact on our network's performance, reliability, or security globally.

CC-BY 2.0. Photo by Ilaria Giacomi.

We’re excited to announce Cloudflare’s 105th data center in Rome. Visitors in Italy (and especially around the region of Lazio) to over 6 million Internet properties now benefit from reduced latency and increased security. As our global network grows in breadth and capacity, we are able to stop attacks (typically, outside of Italy!), while serving legitimate traffic from our nearest in-country data center. Rome serves as a point of redundancy to our existing data center in Milan, and expands Cloudflare’s Europe network to 29 cities, with at least five more cities already in the works.

Siamo orgogliosi di annunciare il 105esimo data center di Cloudflare a Roma. Utenti in tutta Italia (e specialmente nel Lazio e regioni limitrofe) insieme ad oltre 6 milioni di proprietà in rete beneficeranno di latenze ridotte e maggior sicurezza. Con la crescita della nostra rete sia in copertura che capacità, abbiamo la possibilità di fermare attacchi (tipicamente originati fuori del territorio Italiano!) e di servire traffico legittimo dal data center più vicino. Roma offre maggiore ridondanza nella rete in coppia con il data center di Milano ed espande la rete Europea di Cloudflare a 29 città, contando almeno altre 5 maggiori città in via di completamento.

To close followers of Cloudflare blog, with Rome (R) and Yerevan (Y) live, the only remaining letters that aren’t as yet at the start of a city with a Cloudflare datacenter are E, I and U. Our hardware on its way to a transcontinental city promises to makes that list even smaller.

Per chi segue il blog di Cloudflare da vicino, con Roma (R) e Yerevan (Y) attive, la lista di iniziali di città in cui non abbiamo un data center si riduce a E, I e U. Il nostro hardware è già in viaggio verso un città transcontinentale e promettiamo di ridurre ulteriormente la sopra citata lista.

Cloudflare partners closely with hosting providers, value-added resellers, managed service providers, digital agencies, and eCommerce/SaaS platforms to optimize our service. If you are a customer working with one of our partners in Italy, which include Altervista, Planetel and Aruba.it among many others, you will also see an improvement in performance. Plus, it only takes a few clicks to add Cloudflare via one of these partners to make your site faster and safer in seconds. To become a Cloudflare partner, in Italy or anywhere around the world, click here.

Cloudflare collabora strettamente con hosting providers, value added resellers, managed service providers, agenzie digitali e piattaforme eCommerce/SaaS per ottimizzare i servizi. Se sei cliente di uno dei nostri partners in Italia, tra cui citiamo Altervista, Planetel e Aruba.it, anche voi noterete un aumento di performance. Inoltre, tramite questi partners, con pochi clic si può aggiungere Cloudflare e rendere il tuo sito più veloce e sicuri nel giro di pochi secondi. Per diventare partner di Cloudflare, in Italia o ovunque nel mondo, clicca qui.

After Asia, South America and Europe, our 106th Cloudflare data center will be back in North America. Everything’s up to date in our next city! To win some Cloudflare swag: can you guess the name?

Dopo Asia, Sud America ed Europa, il 106esimo data center verrà attivato in Nord America. Vuoi vincere un premio? Indovina la prossima città dove “Everything’s up to date”!

－ The Cloudflare Team

The Cloudflare network today

Team Italy exiting the data center after racking and cabling servers (in style)

Italy is known for many great things. First and foremost, the Azzurri—2006 World Cup champions and (as of yesterday) dashers of England's world cup hopes—but also the Colosseum, the fountains of Florence, the canals of Venice, the Alps, Lambos, pizza, pasta, the good life in Tuscany, Michelangelo, da Vinci, the leaning tower of Pisa, opera, fashion and, of course, colorful gestures. And not forgetting some of the world's largest companies and brands like Luxottica Group, Finmeccanica, Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Bulgari, Barilla, Chicco, Lamborghini, Pirelli and Ferrero.

It is with great pride, and song, that we add CloudFlare's latest data center to the list.

(to the tune of “That’s Amore” by Dean Martin)

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1. When you've had quite enough of this latency stuff,

2. That’s “No more!”, eh?

3. When it seems deja vu, DoS is comin' for you

4. That’s “No more!”, eh?

5. Alarm bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling

6. And you’ll sleep like a baby...

7. First things first, the origin is cursed, fear the worst

8. Only to realize you have CloudFlare...

La Presidenza della Repubblica that is. With the inauguration of our latest data center in Milan we are proud to welcome the President of Italy as our newest customer. The Italian Presidency, joining over 40 other national governments, use CloudFlare to keep their online presences fast and safe. Click here to learn more about CloudFlare services for governments and enterprises.

So, where to from here? The answer isn't song writing, we promise! We'll stick to what we know best. If you've kept pace with our previous data center launch in Madrid, you already know that we're launching four new data centers in countries with, collectively, over 200 million internet users. Stay tuned for what's next...

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