A Look Back at 2024's Internet Traffic Trends

A horizontal bar chart titled '2024 Internet traffic in zettabytes' shows various internet traffic sources ranked by volume. The top bar is 'Actual user-generated payload' at 0.04 ZB, followed by 'Accidental layer 2 forwarding loops' at 0.11 ZB, 'Intelligence agencies collecting Tor exit node traffic' at 0.17 ZB, 'Automatic updates to software we never wanted in the first place' at 0.23 ZB, '438 Javascript frameworks per average web page' at 0.26 ZB, 'IoT devices forever calling out to discontinued servers' at 0.56 ZB, 'Data we would've kept locally but the vendor imposed a cloud subscription model' at 0.61 ZB, 'LLM bot training and autogenerated nonsense' at 0.78 ZB, 'Botnet C&C and attack traffic' at 0.92 ZB, 'RTB auctions' at 0.96 ZB, 'Advertising, spam, phishing, and other scams' at 1.09 ZB, and 'Telemetry and other personal information the user had no idea was being collected' at 1.18 ZB. The chart humorously implies that most internet traffic is not user-generated content but rather background noise, ads, and data collection.

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