The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics is impacting Internet traffic. Cloudflare, an American company that offers content delivery network services, has data for events that affected Internet traffic starting from the first full competition day on July 27.

The US: Between July 26-28, traffic dipped most significantly during gold medalist Simone Biles’ events.

France: French swimmer Léon Marchand’s gold medal and Olympic record-setting performance in the men’s 400-metre individual medley on July 28 had the most significant impact in the host nation. Traffic fell by 17 per cent during his event.

Australia: During Mollie O’Callaghan’s victory in the women’s 200m freestyle on July 29, Australian traffic was 5 per cent lower than the previous week

South Korea: The Korean women’s archery team’s gold medal win on July 28 led to an 8 per cent drop in traffic.

Cybersecurity matters

Largest percentage drops in HTTP request volume as compared to the previous week

Major events attract phishing and spam. From January 2024 through late July, Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security service processed over a million emails containing “Olympics” or “Paris 2024” in the subject. During the week of July 22-28, coinciding with the first few days of the Olympics, there was a 304 per cent increase in such emails compared to the previous week and a staggering 3111 per cent increase compared to the busiest week in January.

DNS request traffic

The top 10 countries with the highest shares of DNS request traffic for the first full day of competitions, July 27, to Olympic sites (percentages rounded) are:

United States: 16%

Germany: 12%

France: 9%

Vietnam: 9%

Brazil: 5%

Australia: 5%

United Kingdom: 4%

Netherlands: 4%

Canada: 3%

South Africa: 2%