The 2026 FIFA World Cup significantly influenced global Internet usage, with Cloudflare reporting measurable shifts in online traffic as billions of fans adjusted their daily routines to follow the tournament.
Drawing on data from its global network of more than 330 points of presence and insights from Cloudflare Radar, the company said the month-long event offered a rare opportunity to observe how one of the world’s biggest sporting spectacles altered HTTP traffic, DNS activity, security trends and broader Internet behavior across countries during June and July 2026.
According to Cloudflare, the World Cup remains one of the few events capable of simultaneously engaging audiences across continents in an era increasingly defined by fragmented online experiences. The company’s analysis highlights how match schedules and fan engagement reshaped global Internet traffic patterns throughout the tournament, underscoring the event’s impact on digital activity worldwide.
How did the World Cup change our behavior online?
To understand how traffic changes throughout a match, a baseline needed to be established for what is “normally” observed. One way to do this is by looking at raw request volumes, or the amount of traffic seen on the network per country.
But these amounts vary per country (the amount of daily traffic in the United States is always a larger number than the traffic in Portugal), which makes it difficult to establish a globally applicable baseline. Instead, “normal” was defined using the median traffic of the four preceding weeks: a month-long window that provided a stable, per-minute reference and smoothed out day-to-day noise.
To evaluate whether traffic rose or fell relative to that baseline without comparing a high-volume country against a low-volume one, the ratio of current to baseline traffic was calculated, expressed as a log₂ value: the log makes increases and decreases symmetric around zero (+1 = twice normal, −1 = half). In other words, a score of zero means traffic is perfectly normal, a positive number shows a spike, and a negative number shows a drop.
Whether you’re staying up late or waking up early, kickoff time impacts traffic
One factor shaping how traffic changes is simply what time the match kicks off locally. The largest changes in activity happen when a match is played in the overnight and early-morning hours — roughly midnight to 8am local time.
These are the hours when very few people are normally online, so fans staying up (or waking early) to watch push traffic well above its usual level, more than doubling it in some cases. Deviation peaks on both workdays and weekends during these hours.
By contrast, matches played during normal daytime and working hours — around 9 a.m. to mid-afternoon — don’t show such an impact: traffic stays close to its usual level, likely because the people watching would already have been online anyway.
In the early evening there’s a smaller, second lift, most visible on weekdays, as a match keeps people connected at a time when usage would normally start to wind down. Weekends follow a similar shape, with the strong early-morning rise but a gentler evening bump.
The impact of kickoff time is easiest to see when comparing matches within a single country that take place at very different hours. Bosnia and Herzegovina provides a clear example. When Bosnia played at 2 a.m. local time, people stayed awake to watch and traffic during the game jumped to well above its normal level, at times more than doubling.
When Bosnia played in the evening, the opposite happened: traffic dipped below normal (falling to about 70% of typical value), as people put their devices aside and focused on the match itself.
When Brazil played Japan in the Round of 32 (Brazil won 2–1 on June 29, 2026), the two countries watched the very same game 12 hours apart: kickoff in Brasília (GMT−3) fell during normal waking hours in Rio de Janeiro (GMT−3), while in Tokyo (GMT+9) it landed in the dead of night.
The result is two nearly parallel curves for the same 90 minutes: one higher than normal, one lower. Japan’s traffic sits well above normal, around +1, roughly double its usual level, because the match aired in the small hours, when almost no one would ordinarily be online.
Brazil’s traffic, by contrast, runs below normal, around −0.4, as the game fell in the middle of an ordinary active day. In this case, watching the match pulled people away from their usual browsing rather than adding to it.
Which matches moved the Internet most?
One of the most compelling aspects of the World Cup is seeing which storylines and teams capture the attention of fans across the world. For each match, the two-hour window after kickoff was evaluated, and for every country with enough baseline traffic to give stable measurements (small, noisy markets are excluded), how far traffic strayed from normal was computed.
The absolute value of each country’s deviation was taken to measure how much traffic changed, not in which direction (a surge and a drop both count as impact), and for each match the median of those absolute deviations across all countries was measured. Because several group-stage matches were played simultaneously, making it impossible to attribute a country’s traffic swing to one game or the other, those concurrent matches were dropped to avoid ambiguity.
The result is a ranking of the matches that moved the Internet most, worldwide. The very top spot was not snagged by a final or semifinal. It was Argentina vs. Switzerland on July 11, a quarterfinal that saw Argentina win 3-1 — and that moved Internet traffic by a factor of about 1.26. That put it ahead of the France vs. Spain semifinal, which had a factor of 1.21. The rest of the top matches were a mix of quarterfinals, round-of-16 and even round-of-32 ties.
The teams that moved the Internet: Argentina, followed by France, Spain and Norway
To decide which team the world watched most, each team’s matches were analyzed and the median worldwide impact across all countries was aggregated. In other words, when a given team took the field, how much did the typical country’s traffic move away from normal?
Argentina topped the list at 1.17x, meaning that when Argentina played, the typical country’s traffic swung about 17% away from its normal level, the strongest global pull of any team. This comes as no surprise, since they were the defending champions and each knockout game could have been Lionel Messi’s last dance for his national team. People were watching them.
Not far behind were nations packed with superstars such as France, Brazil, Portugal, Morocco, Spain — and Norway, fueled by the Erling Haaland phenomenon. Haiti and Iraq appear in the top as outliers due to their high deviation scores relative to their typical traffic, suggesting matches against major teams drove disproportionate engagement.
Sharp increase in traffic to sports betting sites
Compared to HTTP request data in the month preceding the World Cup, there was an overall increase in requests to gambling industry websites since the opening game.
Additionally, whereas pre-tournament traffic followed a clear weekly pattern, after the Cup’s opening game, the trend flattened into a more constant profile, likely a consequence of the high, near-daily regularity of matches.
Divergent Behavior: Why Traffic Patterns Varied by Country
Because Cloudflare is present in 120+ countries and handles traffic from Internet users worldwide, distinct behavioral patterns across the globe are visible. For example, when examining the deviation trends during the Algeria vs. Austria group stage game on June 28, Austria’s traffic increased during halftime, while Algeria’s decreased. The former follows the pattern described above of people spending more time online while not watching the game, while Algeria’s is the complete opposite — and they’re not the only ones.
Countries clustered by behavior
To understand patterns in behavior across countries, every country’s match-day behavior was grouped by the shape of its traffic curve and allowed to cluster together.
Grouping match-day traffic shapes this way, three distinct patterns emerge. The largest group (44 countries playing 101 matches) shows Internet usage rising during hydration breaks and halftime, the natural pauses in play, as people reach for their phones. A second, smaller group (8 countries playing 18 matches) is its near mirror image: traffic falls at exactly those same moments, dipping during the breaks instead of climbing.
The third group is an outlier, made up entirely of Iran’s three matches. The explanation is simple: the May baseline was measured while Iran was still coming back online after the shutdown, so its match-day traffic sits far above that depressed reference, producing a deviation unlike any other country’s.
Streaming makes some countries appear more online
To better understand the second cluster, which included Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt and DR Congo, the traffic mix for these countries was examined more closely. Traffic patterns were broken down by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME type, and grouped in families to easily distinguish clusters of content types.
MIME types act like digital labels that tell browsers exactly what kind of file they are receiving, whether it’s an HTML page, a JPEG image, or an MP4 video stream. By tracking these labels, what kinds of content users are consuming can be inferred.
The hypothesis was that this behavior could be explained by a disproportionate amount of people watching the games via streaming in those countries. To test this, traffic pattern distribution was compared in games with teams of both clusters.
In Algeria, traffic was far above normal, then dipped at halftime, with a large increase in streaming traffic.
In Austria, where streaming services were used less, Internet traffic increased at halftime.
This supports the hypothesis that the traffic trendlines correlate with use of streaming to watch the match. In Algeria, traffic rose sharply at kickoff, dropped during half-time, and returned to elevated levels once the second half began. Hydration breaks, by contrast, had little to no visible effect, which suggests that viewers don’t meaningfully change their Internet or social behavior for short, in-play pauses, but do so during the longer halftime interval.
Other countries in this cluster show similar behavior. This might be because a viewer is unlikely to close a stream for a three-minute cooling break, but a fifteen-minute halftime is long enough to close the stream and step away.
What do people do during halftime?
A minority of countries, including Tunisia and Algeria, disconnect during halftime, with traffic dropping below its in-play level. The majority of countries go the other way: traffic rises during the break as people pick up their phones the moment play stops, then settles again when the second half begins. Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina show this most strongly, with halftime traffic running well above their in-play baseline.
And hydration breaks?
Halftime is a long, familiar pause, but what about the much shorter hydration breaks? These last only about three minutes, taken midway through each half. Is three minutes really enough to change how people behave online? It turns out it is. Just as at halftime, the moment play briefly stops, traffic in most countries ticks up before falling again when the game resumes.
This was measured by taking, for each match, the peak number of requests in a window around the middle of each half (where the hydration break falls) and comparing it to the five minutes immediately before the break. The pattern lines up with everything seen so far: the same audiences that surge at halftime also spike during these brief pauses, while the few countries that tend to disconnect during breaks show little or no lift. Even a three-minute gap in play is enough for a large share of viewers to glance back at their phones.
The final matches
At the scale of Cloudflare Radar‘s global HTTP requests, it is genuinely hard for any single event to leave a visible mark. Even so, the 2026 World Cup Final, which pitted Europe’s and American football champions against each other, had enough social impact to affect the Internet’s footprint. When looking at the volume of HTTP bytes from June 20 to June 22, the final match kicking off at 21:00 UTC on June 19 can be immediately identified, as well as England vs. France for the Bronze medal at 23:00 UTC on June 18.
During the final match, Argentina and Spain’s traffic volume increased up to 20 percentage points when compared to a similar period. The bronze medal match also coincided with a traffic increase, although at a smaller scale.
HTTP request volume during the final match also appeared correlated not only with the timeline of the game, but with each individual stage as well. Looking at the data, moments such as the kickoff, halftime break, hydration breaks, as well as the final whistle can be roughly pinpointed.
