Cloudflare Radar data indicates that web traffic in Russia has almost tripled over the past year. The growth is confirmed by data from the country’s largest Internet traffic exchange point MSK-IX: over the past year, the average traffic transmitted in the company’s services has increased by 27%, and the most active growth has been observed since July-August of this year, when Russians began to experience problems with access to YouTube.
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Internet traffic passing through the largest Russian exchange point MSK-IX (network infrastructure where backbone channels of different operators intersect) has grown by more than a third over the past year. Between November 22, 2023 and November 22, 2024, peak traffic values increased by 36% from 5,279 to 7,181 TB/s. It is noted that the growth dynamics intensified at the end of July – beginning of August, and in November the company set a historical record for the volume of traffic on the MSK-IX network – for the first time the milestone of 7 TB/s was overcome.
Cloudflare Radar data confirms a significant increase in Internet traffic in Russia, which began at the turn of July and August. TelecomDaily CEO Denis Kuskov believes that in the second half of this year alone, total Internet traffic in the country grew by 30%, while in recent years it has grown by about 20% per year. Telecom operators noted a 5-10% jump in traffic volume back in August.
According to experts, the growth in traffic since August is due to the fact that after the slowdown of YouTube in Russia, users began to more often download videos from foreign servers of the video service, bypassing the infrastructure of caching servers from Google in Russia (Google Global Cache). Problems accessing YouTube have led to a noticeable increase in traffic “services that correct the situation”, and also users began to download videos from Google’s foreign servers more often, experts say. Telecom operators in August noticed a jump in the total volume of traffic by 5-10%, but now they did not disclose new data.
The growth in traffic could have been facilitated by an increase in traffic and downloads of Telegram, some of whose servers are located in Europe. DDoS attacks from foreign countries also contribute. Also, the growth of foreign traffic in general is influenced by the situation with site blocking in Russia, because a number of users find ways to bypass them, and such traffic becomes foreign, increasing the load on the joints.
Against the backdrop of YouTube’s slowdown, VK reported on the success of the VK Video platform in the third quarter of 2024. The company invested in improving the service, including technology and content management. As a result, average daily views increased by 48.5%, reaching 2.6 billion, and the number of downloads increased by 20%, to 30 million. The CDN network was expanded: more than 150 nodes cover all federal districts of Russia and the CIS countries. The developers have implemented AI algorithms for speech recognition and subtitle creation. VK Video, VKontakte and OK were the first among Russian services to receive support for the AV1 video codec.
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