UEFA 2024 finals cause dramatic drop in internet traffic

EU Football fans watching their home teams compete in the UEFA European Championship are significantly impacting internet traffic trends within their own countries, Cloudflare analysts found.

The biggest impact on internet traffic during the month-long competition so far, not surprisingly, has occurred during the UEFA semi-finals this past weekend, according to the latest Cloudflare Radar bog released Thursday.

Cloudflare began analyzing internet traffic since the start of the UEFA championship on June 14th and will continue until the finals between Spain and England on July 14th.

Typically world events broadcast on national TV channels, including sporting games such as the UEFA and the Super Bowl, can have major effects on internet usage across an entire nation – and in this case, the entire European continent, Cloudflare says.

Analyzing internet traffic trends can help protect against cyber threats – including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks which aim to render websites inoperable by flooding them with traffic requests – as well as maintaining website availability on a global scale, according to the company.

What makes monitoring the UEFA unique is that internet usage can be analyzed country by country, and traffic drops are seen coinciding with which teams were playing on what days.

Cloudflare says that “critical moments such as last-minute goals, extra time, or penalty shootouts” tend to cause larger drops in traffic as fans laser-focus on the game.

Analysts found distinct patterns were observed in finalist nations, showing high viewer engagement during those key matches.

For example, powerhouse team match-ups, such as the recent finals involving both Spain and England, resulted in “significant traffic reductions at critical moments, particularly during the knockout stages,” Cloudflare noted.

For example, traffic was found to have decreased the most at the end of the games in Spain (19%) and England (11%).

While, for the Netherlands (27%) and France (16%), the largest drops took place mostly in the first half of the finals.

The average drop among all nations was clocked at 6%.

Other nations that saw the largest drops in internet traffic during the first week of the games included the Netherlands (18%), Turkey (16%), Belgium (15%), Croatia (14%), and Slovakia (14%).

Interestingly, very few cyberattacks were noted to have taken place during the games, except for several attacks in Germany during the second day of the championship.

“These included application layer DDoS attacks targeting various websites, such as a translation tool, a data protection tool, a search engine, and a local government website,” the data showed.

Additionally, a few countries actually saw a spike in internet traffic during the games including Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Albania which saw a huge 25% jump in internet usage.

This could likely be due to unstable broadcast signals, forcing fans online to watch the games.

Still, Cloudflare said, “Despite the popularity of online services – such as live score apps, sports news sites that track every minute of each game, and betting services enhanced with new visual tools and stats – national team football still significantly diverts attention away from the Internet.”

“Football is incredibly important to Europeans,” Cloudflare said.

Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks operating on the Internet, hosting interconnected data centers in 320 cities in more than 120 countries.

Analyzing internet traffic trends can help protect against cyber threats – including DDoS attacks which aim to render websites inoperable by flooding them with traffic requests – as well as maintaining website availability on a global scale, according to the company.