Cloudflare CEO Says Internet Infrastructure Is Resilient Amid Coronavirus

Last Friday, we released the COVID-19 Traffic Report, which, among other things, breaks down the recent surge in online traffic.

As a follow up, I chatted with Cloudflare CEO and Emerging Tech Brew subscriber Matthew Prince about internet services and scaling up capacity. Cloudflare provides online infrastructure and security services to other businesses.

Big and little internets

Prince breaks down the internet into three parts:

• Lowercase "i" internet—the applications that live on top, such as Facebook, Netflix, and Zoom
• Uppercase "I" Internet—the collection of interconnected global networks
• The "last-mile" piece—internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver the internets to us

The whole thing is holding up well, Prince says. Tech companies have quickly resolved service disruptions and scaled up infrastructure when needed. If the coronavirus pandemic had happened a decade ago, that may not have been the case. Prince cites cloud services as the key piece of technology that's let businesses distribute and scale online workloads.

• And usage spikes appear to be plateauing. "We’re all talking about flattening the curve. Another place where we’re kind of flattening the curve is peak internet utilization."

🤯 Prince says Netflix and YouTube normally account for ~30% of all internet bandwidth. That number is higher now, which is why it was critical for those streaming companies to lower the default resolution of their videos in late March.

Kids and nation states

I was also curious to hear Prince's POV on cybersecurity. In the first week of widespread U.S. lockdowns, he said Cloudflare noticed an uptick in standard phishing attacks but with coronavirus-related language.

• The second week, Cloudflare measured a 70% uptick in attacks online. Many of these incidents took the form of amateur cyberattacks, which tend to rise when kids are out of school.

We also discussed nation state hacking activity, but I'll leave that for the full interview. Read the Q&A here.