November 2021 Summaries

In November, e-commerce websites experienced significant changes in traffic due to the festive season. Cyber Monday was the most popular day for online shopping worldwide, followed by November 22nd and Black Friday. In the US, Cyber Monday also ranked first, with the first two days of November taking second and third place. The Black Friday week saw a sustained increase in traffic over five days. Mobile internet usage increased towards the end of November, with mobile devices representing 55% of total internet traffic during that time.

Cloudflare Radar, launched last year as a "newspaper for the Internet," provides insights into global internet usage and trends. It has expanded its coverage to include dedicated pages on key events such as UEFA Euro 2020 Championship and Tokyo Olympics. The platform now features four main sections: Main page with near real-time information, country-wise internet usage details, domain insights, and deep-dive reports on complex topics. Today, Radar introduces two new data visualizations called Radar Maps to represent geographical distribution of application-level attacks and Sankey diagrams showing top attack flows. These additions aim to provide more visibility into the evolving internet landscape.

On Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2021, US internet traffic experienced a significant slowdown during the time of the traditional dinner, between 16:00 and 20:00 EST. This was an exception to the overall increase in internet traffic observed throughout the week, which is traditionally a good period for online shopping. Mobile traffic also increased during Thanksgiving week, representing 54% of US internet traffic on November 25th, compared to the usual 46%. Cloudflare Radar provides insights into these trends and can be used to monitor global and country-specific internet traffic patterns.

The Web Summit 2021 took place in Lisbon, Portugal from November 1-4, with over 42,000 attendees from 128 countries. The event focused on internet trends and discussions about the future of technology. Topics included the metaverse, digital divide, Web3, data privacy, security, ethics in AI, decentralized web, workplace changes, digitalization of healthcare, mental health, behavior changes in humans, and decentralization of financial services. Notable speakers included Chris Cox (CPO of Meta), Jon Vlassopulos (Global Head of Music, Roblox), Sonia Jorge (Executive Director, World Wide Web Foundation), David Kiron (Editorial director, MIT Sloan Management Review), Ana Maiques (Co-founder and CEO, Neuroelectrics), Siyabulela Mandela (Director for Africa Journalists for Human Rights), Carlos Moedas (Newly elected Mayor of Lisbon), Sudarsan Reddy (Cloudflare engineer), Yusuf Sherwani (Co-founder & CEO, Quit Genius), David Shrier (American futurist and Professor of Practice, AI & Innovation with Imperial College Business School in London), and Dame Til Wykes (Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at King's College London).

The text discusses the inner workings of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) within Cloudflare's Spectrum service. It highlights that while UDP is simple in principle, there is a lot of domain knowledge needed to run things at scale. The text covers topics such as connected vs unconnected sockets, handling packets from wildcard sockets, and the challenges of graceful server restarts for UDP services. It also introduces an "established-over-unconnected" technique that can help manage long-lived flows in a UDP environment. The text concludes by noting that there are still many complexities to explore within the realm of production UDP servers.

Argo for Spectrum is now generally available, offering improved performance and connectivity for TCP-based applications such as Minecraft, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and SFTP. This service extends Cloudflare's DDoS protection to any TCP or UDP protocol, addressing latency, packet loss, and other factors that impact network performance. Argo for Spectrum uses the same intelligence and routing plane as Argo Smart Routing but applies it to any TCP-based application. Throughput improvements of up to 108% have been observed in benchmark tests conducted by Catchpoint.

On November 20, 2021, Burkina Faso experienced an internet shutdown following social tensions that began on November 14, 2021, and the shooting of protesters attempting to block a French military convoy. The shutdown affected all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country, including Orange, FasoNet, and Telecel. Burkina Faso is primarily mobile-first for internet access, with 77% of total internet traffic coming from mobile devices over the last 30 days. The shutdown disproportionately affected mobile networks, leading to a significant increase in desktop traffic percentage. This situation can be monitored using Cloudflare Radar, which provides real-time data on global and country-specific internet traffic.

On November 18, 2021, internet traffic started to resume in Sudan after a nearly complete shutdown lasting 25 days due to political turmoil. The biggest internet access disruption in the country's recent history occurred in 2019 for 36 days. Internet service was mostly restored by two ISPs, Mobitel and MTN, with mobile traffic seeing a significant increase. Sudan has experienced frequent internet shutdowns and social media restrictions, often during times of political unrest.

Cloudflare has reported significant improvements in network performance, becoming the fastest provider in 79 new networks, an increase of 14% among the top 1,000 networks worldwide. The company achieved this by addressing unique challenges faced in different countries and optimizing its global network. Additionally, Cloudflare Workers platform is now 196% faster than Fastly's [email protected], based on time to first byte tests. These improvements aim to enhance the overall performance of users' stacks.

The author discusses how handling payments is crucial for building an online business, with Stripe being a popular choice among developers. They mention that older versions of Stripe's SDK had core Node.js dependencies which made it incompatible with Cloudflare Workers. However, the recent availability of the stripe JS package for Cloudflare Workers allows developers to use the native Stripe SDK directly in their projects. This opens up opportunities for developers using Cloudflare Pages to begin using Stripe alongside their applications and accept payments or handle subscriptions with minimal configuration. The author also provides examples of how to integrate Stripe Checkout into a Pages application and securely validate incoming webhook requests to a Workers function. They announce a new Workers template in partnership with Stripe, which helps developers get up and running with Stripe and Workers using best practices.

Cloudflare is developing an example feature-complete SaaS application that will be built entirely on the Cloudflare stack. The project, which is open-source on GitHub, aims to help developers build their own SaaS applications and serves as a template for launching them. The CMS application model is chosen as a great case study for this open-source example due to its transformation over the years and its relevance in the serverless era. The project will progress in milestones, with each phase adding new features or integrating with a new Cloudflare product. The completed application can be deployed to developers' own Cloudflare accounts within minutes after updating a few service tokens.

Cloudflare has announced new customization options for its Stream Player, aiming to provide users with more control over the video playback experience. These updates include setting a primary color to match a company's brand, enabling deep linking within videos, auto-enabling captions by default, and revamping the Embed tab for easier configuration of properties like poster images and primary colors. The Stream Player now supports more ways to personalize video playback, making it easier for users to create an engaging viewing experience.

The text discusses how to build a custom video and streaming application using Cloudflare Stream, Access, Pages, and Workers. It provides an example of creating a video application inspired by Cloudflare TV, which includes user authentication, uploading recorded videos or livestreaming new content, and displaying a list of all videos. The text also covers how to secure the app with middleware and tie everything together using Cloudflare Pages for deployment and hosting.

Tejas Mehta shares his experience building cClip, a serverless application that allows users to transfer files between devices regardless of their operating system. The architecture for cClip integrates with various SaaS products such as Firebase, RevenueCat, and Stripe. One of the major challenges was creating clients for every single OS and platform out there, which Flutter helped address. The backend uses five main technologies: Backblaze B2, Firebase Auth, Firebase Database, RevenueCat, and Cloudflare Workers. Some of the biggest challenges faced during development included cross-platform subscriptions and file storage tracking. Overall, cClip demonstrates the potential for future application development where SaaS applications can be easily imported and integrated with bi-directional communication through events with Webhooks.

Stripe, a leading payment processing service, has made its JavaScript SDK compatible with Cloudflare Workers, allowing developers to use the native Stripe SDK directly in their projects. This compatibility opens up new opportunities for developers who have deployed sites to Cloudflare Pages to begin using Stripe right alongside their applications. With this update, any JavaScript example currently in Stripe's extensive documentation works directly in Workers without needing to make any changes. Additionally, using Workers to handle the multitude of available Stripe webhooks means that developers can get better visibility into how their existing projects are working, without needing to spin up any new infrastructure.

Jacob Hands, a developer by trade, operates TriTails Premium Beef, an online store for meat. To handle their growth, he turned to Airtable and Cloudflare Workers to automate much of their workflow. The integration of these two platforms has made the process easier to build, test, and reuse code. Automating tasks such as transit time calculations, order triaging, printing packing slips, and updating package details in ShipStation has saved TriTails Premium Beef multiple hours every day. Cloudflare Workers' serverless nature ensures that there are no issues with servers being down, while Airtable provides a great user interface for data entry and visualization.

In November 2021, Cloudflare announced the release of new features for its Images product, including AVIF support and blur functionality. The AVIF format significantly compresses images without compromising quality, resulting in faster delivery times. Blur can be used to create previews for paid content while protecting private images via signed URLs. Additionally, users can now serve images from their own domains using custom Workers or a special URL. Furthermore, new attractively priced bundles have been introduced for both Cloudflare Images and Stream, making it easier for creators to upload, store, and deliver their content.

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature called "HTTP Response Header Modification" within its Transform Rules for all plans. This functionality allows users to set or remove HTTP response headers as traffic passes through Cloudflare back to the client, enabling customers to enrich responses with information about request handling and debugging data. Previously, this was done using a Cloudflare Worker, but now it can be accomplished without writing any code. The new feature is especially useful for administrators who do not have complete control over their website's origin, such as those using SaaS providers or other third-party services.

Cloudflare has launched its Developer Expert Program to support and recognize users who build with Workers, Pages, and other tools in the Cloudflare developer ecosystem. Benefits of becoming a Cloudflare Developer Expert include early access to features, private community membership, regular calls with product managers, engineers, and developer advocates, sponsorships for OSS work, and exclusive swag. The program aims to gather feedback from developers early in the development process to improve user experience and ensure successful releases. Developers interested in applying can fill out a form on Cloudflare's website.

Cloudflare has announced that it will eliminate egress fees for its platform, making it more affordable for developers to build large, data-intensive applications without breaking the bank. This move aims to help customers overcome high data transfer costs associated with other cloud providers and enable them to choose their provider based on infrastructure quality rather than costly data egress fees. Additionally, Cloudflare has increased the CPU time limit for its Workers feature from 5 minutes to 15 minutes, allowing developers to run more compute-intensive tasks on the platform. The company is also raising the script size limit and increasing the number of allowed worker scripts per account to support larger applications and more complex use cases.

Cloudflare has announced that its platform, Pages, now supports full-stack deployment with the help of Cloudflare Workers. This integration allows users to deploy their entire application, including frontend, APIs, storage, and data, with a single commit. The process works by writing code, pushing it to a git provider (now supporting GitLab), and allowing Pages to automatically deploy the entire site. The platform leverages Workers to deploy serverless functions on behalf of users. This integration is part of "Full Stack" Week, aimed at giving developers more power to build complex applications.

The text discusses how to build a sample image-sharing platform using Cloudflare Pages and Workers. It demonstrates how to add serverless functions right from within Pages, including dynamic rendering, interacting with other APIs, and persisting data with KV and Durable Objects. The author also explains file-based routing, interfacing with other APIs like Cloudflare Images, and using middleware for authentication or logging purposes. Finally, the text touches upon integrating as Jamstack and local development support provided by wrangler.

The article discusses the growing interest in headless content management systems (CMS) and their integration with various platforms. It highlights partnerships between Cloudflare Pages and CMS providers Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, and WordPress. Deploy Hooks are introduced as a key feature that allows developers to connect and trigger deployments in Pages via updates made in headless CMSes. The article also provides instructions on how to create a Deploy Hook within the Pages interface. Additionally, it shares quotes from representatives of Sanity and Strapi expressing their excitement about the partnerships and the benefits they bring to content creators and developers.

Cloudflare has announced its integration with GitLab, a DevOps platform, to expand the accessibility of its Pages platform. This move aims to provide more developers with seamless integration and improved workflow by allowing them to create new projects using their existing repositories stored on GitLab. Additionally, an official partnership between Cloudflare and GitLab has been established to enhance future integrations and improve site delivery and updates at scale. Developers can now set up their first project with GitLab through the Pages dashboard and begin making changes directly via commits to GitLab, triggering new builds every time.

Chris Coyier, founder of CSS-Tricks and co-founder of CodePen, has been using Cloudflare Workers for various optimizations on his platforms. CodePen relies heavily on the ability to execute code and store data on Cloudflare's network due to its nature as an online code editor that allows developers to collaborate and share code examples written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Chris uses Workers to manipulate HTML before it reaches users' browsers, stitching together content from external sources. CodePen also leverages Workers KV for data storage, allowing them to cache results and make them accessible on Cloudflare's network near their users. Overall, the integration of Cloudflare Workers into CodePen's stack has enabled highly-performant applications that look towards the future.

Brendan Coll built an automated pipeline to generate Rust and TypeScript types for Workers runtime. The pipeline runs every time the Workers runtime code is built, generating types for both repositories and a JSON file containing intermediate representation of static types. This ensures that the static types are always accurate and up-to-date. The auto-generated types can be used in TypeScript projects by installing @cloudflare/workers-types and adding it to the project's tsconfig.json file. Cloudflare also open-sourced the type information itself in JSON format, allowing anyone interested to create type data for any language they'd like.

Cloudflare Workers now supports JavaScript modules, allowing developers to import and export code in their projects. This feature is based on the ECMAScript (ES) module standard introduced by the "ES6" language specification for JavaScript. The new event handler syntax allows for better organization, maintenance, and re-use of code. Cloudflare Workers also supports other module types such as WebAssembly, text, and binary modules. Developers can try out modules in their browser using the playground or by using the wrangler 2.0 CLI.

The text discusses an update to the developer tooling for Cloudflare Workers. It introduces wrangler 2.0, which simplifies the development process by eliminating the need for configuration and enabling live debugging. The new version also includes a local mode that allows developers to run their Worker on their local machine. Miniflare, a project to locally emulate Workers in Node.js, has been integrated into the local development experience. Developers are encouraged to try out the beta release of wrangler 2.0 and provide feedback for future improvements.

Nodecraft, a gaming server hosting platform, utilizes Cloudflare Workers for various tasks such as optimizing websites, handling redirects, and managing image content negotiation. The company also uses Workers to maintain microsites and APIs that provide game information to the gaming community. By leveraging Cloudflare Workers, Nodecraft has significantly reduced its maintenance costs and improved scalability. The platform is looking forward to integrating more features from Cloudflare's stack, including Workers functions with their Pages applications and utilizing Cloudflare R2 for storage needs.

The introduction of "Services" by Cloudflare aims to enhance the development capabilities of Workers, a platform that allows developers to write code and deploy it globally in just a few seconds. Services are designed to be composable, allowing them to communicate with each other, and support multiple environments for testing changes before promoting them to production. Automatic migration of scripts into services is provided, and the new concept of "Service bindings" allows seamless service-to-service communication without network latency or interruption. Services are versioned and audited, ensuring easy rollback in case of mistakes. The adoption of Services will enable teams to share and reuse code within their organizations while maintaining performance and efficiency.

Cloudflare is developing APIs and infrastructure to support more TCP, UDP, and QUIC-based protocols in Cloudflare Workers. This will enable non-HTTP socket connections to be used as easily as HTTP and WebSockets today. The company has developed an example using a Deno-based Postgres client driver to communicate with a remote Postgres server via WebSocket over a secure Cloudflare Tunnel. However, there are limitations to this approach, such as the need for additional infrastructure to establish and maintain the WebSocket tunnel. To address these issues, Cloudflare is proposing a new socket API that will work across different JavaScript runtimes and be designed generically enough to work with TCP, UDP, and QUIC protocols. The company also plans to introduce Socket Workers, allowing non-HTTP clients to connect directly to Workers using raw TCP, UDP, or QUIC protocols without HTTP.

Full Stack Week highlights how developers are leveraging Cloudflare's network for global applications. Durable Objects, now generally available, simplify state coordination across Workers running at the edge. Unlike traditional databases, Durable Objects provide a simpler programming paradigm and can handle heavy concurrency without frequent transaction rollbacks. They enable developers to write JavaScript classes with unique instances across Cloudflare's network, allowing for in-order message processing and strongly consistent storage API. Applications built on Durable Objects are easy to scale and manage, making them ideal for global applications.

Cloudflare is introducing support for relational databases, including Postgres and MySQL from Workers. This move aligns with their design goals of being global by default, infinitely scalable, and developer-friendly. The challenge in building serverless database connections has been addressed through leveraging cloudflared to create a secure tunnel between Cloudflare and a private network within the user's existing infrastructure. They have also created a shim-layer that adapts the socket API from a popular runtime to connect directly to databases using WebSocket. The goal is to eventually manage database connections, handle replication of data across cloud providers, and provide low-latency access to data globally.

Cloudflare Workers has added support for Prisma and MongoDB Atlas, two highly demanded data platforms by developers. The integration of these platforms enhances the capabilities of Workers, allowing developers to build more applications on its global platform. Both clients are available from their respective authors, Realm for MongoDB and Prisma for Prisma. MongoDB brings a robust query language, MQL, to developers on the Workers platform, supporting rich aggregations right within the database. Prisma is an ORM that abstracts away the complexities of working with the database, handling type-safety, schema migrations, query optimization and interactions between code and the database. Cloudflare Workers continues to expand its partnerships with data companies to bring their capabilities to the Workers platform.

Developer Spotlight is a new blog series showcasing interesting applications built on the Cloudflare Workers Ecosystem. One such application is Full Tilt by Guido Zuidhof, which won first place in the innovation category at Ludum Dare, one of the biggest and oldest game jams around. Full Tilt is a browser game where users control a game on their computer via their phone using Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. The game demonstrates how powerful Durable Objects are by allowing Guido to write all the logic to instantly spin up a personal gaming server anywhere in the world, as close to that player as possible.

The text discusses the vision of "The Network is the Computer" and how it applies to Cloudflare's network. It emphasizes that users should think of the network as a single, global entity providing various services such as CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, Zero Trust, and scalable code deployment. The text also mentions the evolution from writing assembly language for machines to serverless computing, which allows developers to focus on writing code without worrying about underlying hardware or operating systems. Cloudflare's network is everywhere on the planet, ensuring high performance and low latency for deployed code. The company encourages developers to build applications using its platform and will announce new features during Innovation Week.

On November 13th, 2021, Cloudflare detected and mitigated a massive DDoS attack that peaked at just below 2 Tbps, making it the largest one to date. The attack combined DNS amplification attacks and UDP floods and was launched from around 15,000 bots using Mirai code on IoT devices and unpatched GitLab instances. This incident follows a trend of increased attack intensity, with network-layer DDoS attacks increasing by 44% quarter-over-quarter in Q3. Cloudflare's systems were able to detect the attack within sub-seconds and mitigate it without impacting legitimate traffic. The company's mission is to help build a better internet, including making the impact of DDoS attacks a thing of the past through its secure, reliable, performant, and customizable platform for various Internet properties.

John Engates shares five ways to get started with Cloudflare for free. These include transferring or registering a domain with Cloudflare Registrar, configuring DNS on Cloudflare DNS, setting up a blog with Cloudflare Pages, protecting your network with Cloudflare for Teams, and securing your traffic with the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 app and WARP. These methods can help users save money, improve privacy, and enhance security while using Cloudflare services.

On November 12th, a number of vulnerabilities in Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) validation software were disclosed by researchers from the University of Twente. These attacks exploit common assumptions across multiple RPKI implementations and some issues were found within OctoRPKI. Cloudflare customers do not need to take any action as no customer data was ever at risk, and no attempted exploitation has been observed. The company published a new release of OctoRPKI, v1.4.0, to address these vulnerabilities. RPKI is a cryptographic method used for signing records that associate BGP route announcements with the correct originating Autonomous System number. Undefined behavior in validation software and malicious inputs were identified as potential threats. Two classes of attacks disclosed in the NSCS advisory affected OctoRPKI: arbitrary file writes and crash or uncontrolled resource consumption. Cloudflare has implemented bounds checking across many components within OctoRPKI to mitigate these issues. The company is committed to ongoing support of RPKI and looks forward to continuing to work with the security community to make the Internet safer and more secure for everyone.

Meris is an active botnet responsible for a series of recent DDoS attacks that have targeted thousands of websites worldwide. The Meris botnet exploits a vulnerability in the RouterOS operating system used by MikroTik's routers and networking hardware, allowing attackers to gain unauthenticated remote access. Since its appearance, Cloudflare has been tracking and analyzing the activity of the Meris botnet, with more than 33% of all Meris DDoS attack traffic targeting China-based websites. Cloudflare's DDoS protection systems automatically detect and mitigate Meris attacks, protecting customers on both free and paid plans.

Satyen Desai has joined Cloudflare as the Head of Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK) region with a mission to expand its growing customer, partner, and local teams across all countries in SEAK. With immense growth potential in this region, Desai aims to build on Cloudflare's success globally and address the demands in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Indochina, and Korea. He brings diverse experiences from working in various countries and companies like IBM, SAP, Cisco, NTT, and Oracle. The key reasons for joining Cloudflare include its immense growth potential, ever-growing portfolio of solutions, people, and culture. Desai is excited to be part of the journey as Cloudflare aims to help build a better internet by working collaboratively with customers to make them more secure, provide high performance, reduce cost, and simplify network infrastructure management. The company's mission aligns well with the diverse, dynamic, and exciting region of Southeast Asia and Korea, which has seen rapid growth in internet users and ecommerce markets. Cloudflare is currently hiring talented people locally to build and strengthen its local teams across various roles.

Quantum computers pose a threat to current cryptography used in TLS, as they can easily break digital signatures and key exchanges. Fortunately, post-quantum (PQ) cryptography has made significant progress over the last two decades, with NIST expected to announce standardized PQ signature schemes and key exchanges early 2022. Cloudflare is testing the real-world performance of PQ cryptography, having switched to a PQ key exchange in an experiment with Google with little impact on performance. The zoo of PQ signatures includes Dilithium, Falcon, Rainbow, and others, each with varying trade-offs and quirks. Experiments conducted by Cloudflare show that larger signatures can significantly affect TLS handshake times, with a 60% slowdown for the tail-end of users when using Dilithium2 as a drop-in replacement. Adoption of PQ signatures in TLS is crucial to ensure security against quantum computers, and efforts are being made to build a post-quantum secure Internet.

In September 2021, mobile traffic lost importance compared with desktop traffic globally, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere where about 87% of humans live. This trend is more evident in countries that start their school period at this time of year and also due to COVID lockdowns effects. Countries such as Poland, Malta, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Japan, US, Canada, China, Russia, Cyprus, and Nigeria experienced a decrease in mobile traffic percentage after the beginning of September when schools resumed. This shift is attributed to people going back to work or office hours, leading to an increase in desktop traffic.

In Q3 2021, there was a significant increase in HTTP DDoS attacks and the deployment of powerful botnets like Meris. The tech and gaming industries were the most targeted by application-layer attacks, while network-layer attacks increased by 44% worldwide compared to the previous quarter. The Middle East and Africa recorded the largest average attack increase of approximately 80%. Additionally, there was a surge in DTLS amplification attacks, with a 3,549% increase QoQ. Attackers targeted VoIP service providers with massive DDoS attack campaigns in attempts to bring SIP infrastructure down.

A software bug known as "a packet of death" was discovered and debugged by Jakub Sitnicki. The issue caused the network stack to crash in reaction to a single received network packet, taking down the whole operating system with it. This problem was identified in Linux's ipv4 stack, where servers were crashing sporadically. By examining the kernel oops report and using tools like decode_stacktrace.sh script, Sitnicki traced the issue to a specific function and then further analyzed the code leading up to the crash. The bug was found to be related to GSO (Generic Segmentation Offload) and GRO (Generic Receive Offload), which are processes that aim to optimize packet handling in network stacks. By understanding these mechanisms, Sitnicki was able to reproduce the crash and identify the root cause of the issue. The fix involved updating the header offsets in a super-packet as it travels through the gro_complete callbacks.

Cloudflare uses a combination of software delivery models, including the Waterfall Approach for infrastructure rollouts and Agile Approaches for other projects. The company allows teams to decide which methodology they wish to follow within their teams while defining high-level concepts and language that are common to all teams. Key aspects include "SHIP"s as units of work, a SHIP-board for transparency, planning every quarter, and strict rules governing how code reaches data centers.

Sudan has experienced a week-long internet outage following political turmoil that began on October 25, 2021. The situation shows almost no internet activity with just a small amount of traffic trickling in. Internet shutdowns are not uncommon in some countries, including Sudan, where they have occurred more frequently than most nations according to Human Rights Watch. In the past, Sudan has experienced extended network disruptions, such as a 68-day social media and messaging app ban in late 2018 and early 2019, and a full mobile internet shutdown lasting 36 days in mid-2019. Cloudflare Radar provides real-time tracking of global internet traffic, including updates on Sudan's current situation.