Measuring characteristics of TCP connections at Internet scale

Cloudflare just dropped a juicy peek into how real internet connections behave—sampling 1% of traffic across its global content network—and the comments section went feral. Fans say this is the closest thing to a “weather report for the web,” pointing to the scope: 84 million requests per second, ~70% over old-school TCP (the behind-the-scenes handshake for loading pages). Skeptics fired back: Who asked Cloudflare to be hall monitor of the internet? Others questioned what’s missing—HTTP/3 runs on QUIC (a newer protocol), and this post focused on TCP only. Cue the bias wars: defenders argue Cloudflare’s diverse customer base makes the dataset richer than any single app’s logs, critics say it’s still one company’s viewpoint in one week (Oct 7–15, 2025), and simulation nerds debate whether this actually helps model the “real” internet. The meme brigade showed up with “Wireshark is a microscope, Cloudflare is the Hubble,” and a flood of “simulate the internet? good luck” GIFs. Researchers applauded the aggregate insights as rare and useful for safer testing than “deploy and pray,” while privacy hawks demanded raw data transparency or opt-outs. It’s nerd science meets watchdog snark—with popcorn-worthy energy in every thread. Read the post here: Cloudflare blog