Thanksgiving is a tradition celebrated by millions of Americans across six time zones and 50 states, usually involving travel and bringing families together. This year, it was celebrated yesterday, on November 23, 2023. With the Internet so deeply enmeshed into our daily lives, anything that changes how so many people behave is going to also have an impact on online traffic. But how big an impact, exactly?

At a high level: a 10% daily decrease in Internet traffic in the US (compared to the previous week). That happens to be the exact same percentage decrease we observed in 2022. So, Thanksgiving in the US, at least in the realm of Internet traffic, seems consistent with last year.

Let’s dig into more details about how people deal with cooking (or online ordering!) and whether family gatherings are less online, according to our Cloudflare Radar data. We’ll also touch on whether hackers stop for turkey, too.

While we can see a 10% overall daily drop in US traffic due to Thanksgiving, the drop is even more noticeable when examining traffic on an hour-by-hour basis. Internet activity began to decrease significantly after 12:00 EST, persisting until 19:00 EST (during those times, it was at least 15% lower compared to the previous week).

The peak drop for the entire country occurred around 21:00 UTC, which is 16:00 EST and 13:00 PST. That drop represented 22% less traffic than the previous week at the same hour. That’s also the same time and percentage of drop we’ve seen in 2022.

If we continue the country-wide comparison with the previous week, we also see how traffic really begins to pick up again during early Black Friday morning in the US (as much as 18% higher than in the previous week).

However, it’s also interesting to do an analysis of state by state looking at local time. One question we were curious about: from an Internet perspective, what time best represents the Thanksgiving hour? This would be the time when traffic dropped the most in each state.

We find that across states, it’s not exactly 4pm, as The Atlantic has made a case for!, but rather, most states experience the largest drop the hour before — 15:00 local time. But that’s not the only interesting trend! We observe that:

• Central US states such as Kansas, Iowa, Alabama, or Mississippi apparently had an earlier Thanksgiving — given the biggest drop in traffic was at 13:00.

• Coastal US states like Washington, California, Florida, Maryland, or Delaware had a later Thanksgiving, around 17:00. There’s also Hawaii, which had the latest of all — experiencing the biggest drop in traffic around 18:00 local time.

What surprised us the most when looking at these trends was how the “Thanksgiving time” was the same from our 2022 data in almost all the states, but also the hourly and daily drop in traffic across the US was mostly the same. It appears that when it comes to Thanksgiving, we are indeed creatures of habit.

To consider when traffic drops the most, we look between the local time of 13:00-18:00 and compare that to the week before.

This method allows us to observe clear differences between states, with more central US states showing larger drops in traffic compared to the previous week, while coastal states are not as significantly impacted. The exception along the US coast is Massachusetts, which experienced a 31% drop in traffic. East coast states also show a bigger drop in traffic compared to the West coast.

Here’s the ranking of the 50 states (plus DC or the District of Columbia), ordered by the biggest drops in traffic, for those who want to explore our data better:

Another, perhaps unsurprising, trend is the rise of mobile devices over the Thanksgiving week in the US. Yesterday, on November 23, mobile traffic accounted for 54.5% of the Internet traffic in the US (the graph below rounds the percentages). It followed a similar trend in 2021 — we published a blog about it — and in 2022, although last year it was at 53.8%.

Looking at the past few weeks, the growth in mobile use in US Internet traffic is more evident. The average percentage of mobile traffic during the first week of November was 47% in the US; during this Thanksgiving week, it reached 51%, with the previously mentioned 54.5% peak on Thanksgiving Day (even higher than the typical weekend, which usually demonstrates more mobile usage).

It’s not just mobile usage that’s going up, though. Over the next few days, we’re expecting to see a surge in traffic to make up for the Thanksgiving lull.

The following chart presents the 2022 perspective on HTTP requests in the US, illustrating how the peak traffic of the year was reached on November 28, Cyber Monday. It's also notable how Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, followed by January 1, 2023, exhibit the most significant drops in traffic in the US.

Now, let’s explore whether there was an increase in late food delivery or online grocery shopping related to Thanksgiving. Traditionally, this is a time for cooking with family, but not everyone enjoys cooking. DNS traffic (from our 1.1.1.1 resolver) to food delivery sites was higher than the previous week on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 21 and 22, 2023, respectively, but notably dropped in the early morning on Thanksgiving Day.

Daily DNS traffic to food delivery services indicates a gradual increase throughout this month leading up to Thanksgiving Day, followed by a clear drop on the day itself, as much as 12%.

How about online grocery shopping services, catering to those last minute ingredients? DNS traffic to those sites was noticeably higher than the previous week on Tuesday but decreased on Wednesday, experiencing a distinct drop on Thanksgiving Day.

To answer that, let’s examine DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which remain one of the most common methods to disrupt or take down Internet properties. Our data indicates that in November 2023, Thanksgiving had the lowest percentage of traffic classified as DDoS attacks targeting the US.

Cloudflare Area 1 also enables us to analyze email messages sent from the US perspective. Unsurprisingly, our data reveals a 43% drop in email messages sent on Thanksgiving Day compared to the previous week. However, the spam percentage of all emails originating from the US increased to 4%, significantly higher than the 2% recorded on the same day of the previous week.

On the flip side, messages considered malicious stayed consistent in their percentage of all messages.

"The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for." — Norman Vincent Peale, American author

Thanksgiving Day in the United States still holds as a strong tradition in 2023, celebrating family, togetherness, and feasting that go beyond state borders and screens. Yet, notable differences exist among states, especially between the coastal and the central areas of the country.

Our data also hints at a slowdown in food deliveries and cyber threats during this time. Perhaps hackers are taking a day off. But, just wait for the story to change on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We'll keep an eye out.

Thanksgiving 2023 was also the day we announced that Stable Diffusion and Code Llama AI models are now available as part of Workers AI, running in over 100 cities across Cloudflare’s global network. If you’re looking to tinker with some new technology over this holiday weekend, we think you’ll enjoy these!

And finally — don't forget, you can check Cloudflare Radar to track global and country-specific Internet traffic trends.

"The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for." — Norman Vincent Peale, American author

The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Yesterday, November 24, 2022, was Thanksgiving Day in the US. A time for families and loved ones to be together and thankful, according to the tradition. Last year, we saw how the US paused shopping (and browsing) for Thanksgiving. So, how was it this year? Not only did we see Internet traffic go down (by 13%) during Thanksgiving dinner, but it was much higher than usual the day before and the day after (the Black Friday effect… so far). There was also a clear, but short, Thanksgiving Day effect on e-commerce DNS trends.

We'll have to wait to see what Black Friday looks like.

Let’s start with Internet traffic at the time of Thanksgiving dinner. Although every family is different, a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.

That said, Cloudflare Radar shows that between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (we use that as the standard timezone in Radar) there was a clear drop in Internet traffic, mostly between 21:00 and 22:00 UTC, when traffic dropped 13%, compared with the week before. That time period is “translated” for the East Coast to between 16:00 and 20:00 EST and for the West Coast the time between 13:00 to 17:00 PST. Similar to what we saw last year.

Radar also allows anyone to focus on the last 24 hours and check the traffic volume change compared with the previous period. The more granular view in the next graph shows not only the 13% drop during Thanksgiving dinner, but also the clear increase after. At around 01:00 EST (22:00 PST), traffic was 15% higher than the day before, and today, November 25, Black Friday morning (08:00 EST, 05:00 PST), was growing ~16% more in traffic at 09:00 EST (06:00 PST).

It’s a similar perspective when we look at the last seven days, a filter that also shows the night before Thanksgiving in the US, traffic was 15% higher than the week before at around 01:00-03:00 EST (22:00-00:00 PST). And there’s a general increase in traffic this week, probably related to the fact it is also "Black Friday Week" (more on e-commerce trends at the end).

In terms of Internet traffic growth (made by humans, not bots) in November, there’s a clear increase throughout the month, but mostly this week. The next chart aggregates traffic by day. So far, Tuesday, November 22, 2022, was the day of the month with most traffic in the US — +13% than what we saw on Tuesday, November 1.

It’s also clear in the previous graph that weekends in the US have less traffic, especially Saturdays, but that Thanksgiving Day was the one with less traffic of the past two weeks — 10% less traffic than the same day the week before.

We’ve been focused on human Internet traffic. Bots, on the other hand, are not that interested in the Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and there was actually more bot traffic in the US last week than in this one. So far.

To wrap up this Internet traffic section, let’s look at mobile device trends. In the last four weeks, we saw an average of 48% of Internet traffic in the US coming from mobile devices. But on Thanksgiving Day that average was 55%. That was actually the day in November when people in the US were most online using their mobile devices.

Here’s the view that shows the mobile percentage difference from the past two weeks, with an up to 9% increase (compared with the previous week) in mobile devices' predominance in Internet traffic, between 10:00 and 16:00 EST (07:00-13:00 PST).

Now, let’s look at DNS query trends (from our globally used 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver) to e-commerce websites in the US. First, the Thanksgiving Day effect.

Aggregating several e-commerce domains, we can see not only that there are several spikes in the last two weeks, but that during Thanksgiving, there was a clear dip in DNS traffic between 15:00 and 17:00 EST (12:00-14:00 PST). How much? At 17:00 EST, Thanksgiving Day, there was 13% less DNS traffic than in the previous week.

We have been following e-commerce trends this week on our Cloudflare Radar Twitter account. And, so far, November 14, 21 and 22, were the days that generated most interest.

Using a smoothed seven-day rolling average to those e-commerce domains (only in the US), the growth trend for the past 30 days is even more clear in the past two weeks (after a clear dip in early November). From November 13 to November 22, the rolling average grew ~5%.

Last year, Cyber Monday was the biggest day for online shopping, in terms of DNS queries that we saw. Next week, we’ll see how it was this year.

Also, this week, Japan had its Labor Thanksgiving, an annual public holiday that was celebrated on Wednesday, November 23, 2022. And there was also a clear impact, but because, in Japan, this is a day full of events held throughout the country, there was an increase in traffic during the day. How much?

The peak was at around 01:00 UTC (10:00 in local time), when Internet traffic was 60% higher than in the previous week (and it remained high during Labor Thanksgiving Day).

You can check Cloudflare Radar, but also our Twitter account where we continue to see country patterns related to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar (Internet traffic does shift, depending on the country, when national teams are playing), but also e-commerce DNS trends.

First, let’s look at shopping habits. After a busy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, online shopping paused for Thanksgiving Day and dipped at lunchtime. So in a very good week for e-Commerce, Thanksgiving was an exception, especially at the extended lunchtime.

Now, let’s focus on Internet traffic at the time of the Thanksgiving Dinner. First, what time is that? Every family is different, but a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.

Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic in the US increased this past seven days, compared with the previous period, and that makes sense given that it’s traditionally a good week for online shopping. But we can also see in the next chart that the time of Thanksgiving dinner in the continental US was a clear exception.

The circle in red in the chart clearly shows us that yesterday afternoon in the US the Internet traffic was a lot slower than the previous days at the same time and that’s more evident between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (we use that as a standard timezone in Radar). That time period is “translated” for the East Coast between 16:00 and 20:00 EST and for the West Coast the time between 13:00 to 17:00 PST.

We can also use Cloudflare Radar to see that in the last two weeks Internet traffic in the US has been increasing (compared with the same period of the previous month). In a time of the year when temperatures go down, Internet traffic was definitely going up. That’s more evident this week after Sunday, November 21.

The biggest spike of the last 30 days, so far (maybe today, Black Friday, November 26, will change that — you can see the live trends using Radar), was definitely in the evening of Monday, November 22 (~02:00 UTC, November 23). This past Tuesday night, November 23, was the second day of the month with the highest traffic in the US, and the third day was actually the next day (Wednesday, November 24).

We can also see on Radar (represented in the next chart) that after several days of the Internet traffic peaks being reached at around 02:00 UTC (which “translates” to 21:00 EST and 18:00 PST), this Thanksgiving Day it was reached later, at about 03:00 UTC (22:00 EST and 19:00 PST).

Another interesting trend regarding Thanksgiving week in the US is how there are more people this week using mobile devices to access the Internet than in the previous weeks.

Yesterday, November 25, mobile traffic represented 54% of the Internet traffic in the US. That’s 8% more than the usual 46% of mobile traffic percentage in the US that we registered in the last 30 days — in the last seven days that number goes up to 49%.

Actually, back in October when we blogged about the popularity of mobile traffic in the world, only 42% of the Internet traffic in the US was made using mobile devices.

We can actually see this more clearly when we only focus on mobile traffic. This past Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, the mobile traffic percentage in the US increased by about 6% compared to the previous week:

When we announced Cloudflare Radar, back in September 2020, we explained how Internet use follows patterns that humans create. Throughout the pandemic we saw different trends caused by people being more at home than usual, but Internet patterns also change at specific times of the year (like when students go back to school or when it’s colder outside) or on some holidays like Thanksgiving.

Like we saw in the US yesterday, a holiday can affect Internet traffic as a whole, but also the time of the day we are online most, the devices we use to access the Internet and the types of websites we visit (e-commerce websites are getting an increase in traffic this week).

And remember: you can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see Internet traffic globally and in every country.

So if you want to relax in an active and learning way this weekend, here are some of the topics we’ve covered on the Cloudflare blog this past week that you may find interesting.

Making things fast is one of the things we do at Cloudflare. More responsive websites, apps, APIs, and networks directly translate into improved conversion and user experience. On November 10, Google announced that Google Search will directly take web performance and page experience data into account when ranking results on their search engine results pages (SERPs), beginning in May 2021.

Rustam Lalkaka and Rita Kozlov explain in this blog post how Google Search will prioritize results based on how pages score on Core Web Vitals, a measurement methodology Cloudflare has worked closely with Google to establish, and we have implemented support for in our analytics tools. Read the full blog post.

Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware

At the Cloudflare Core, we process logs to analyze attacks and compute analytics. In 2020, our Core servers were in need of a refresh, so we decided to redesign the hardware to be more in line with our Gen X edge servers. We designed two major server variants for the core. The first is Core Compute 2020, an AMD-based server for analytics and general-purpose compute paired with solid-state storage drives. The second is Core Storage 2020, an Intel-based server with twelve spinning disks to run database workloads. This is a refresh of the hardware that Cloudflare uses to run analytics provided big efficiency improvements.

Read the full blog post by Brian Bassett

We previously explained how and why we built Quicksilver. Quicksilver is the data store responsible for storing and distributing the billions of KV pairs used to configure the millions of sites and Internet services which use Cloudflare. This second blog post is about the long journey to production which culminates with Kyoto Tycoon removal from Cloudflare infrastructure and points to the first signs of obsolescence.

Geoffrey Plouviez takes you through the entire story of real-world engineering challenges and what it’s like to replace one of Cloudflare’s oldest critical components.

In this blog post, we explore how Cloudflare Workers continues to excel as a JAMstack deployment platform, and how it can be used to power e-commerce experiences, integrating with familiar tools like Stripe, as well as new technologies like Nuxt.js, and Sanity.io.

Read the full blog post and get all the details and open-source code from Kristian Freeman.

When we review design documents at Cloudflare, we are always on the lookout for Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). In this post, we present a timeline of a real-world incident, and how an interesting failure mode known as a Byzantine fault played a role in a cascading series of events.

Tom Lianza and Chris Snook’s  full blog post on Byzantine faults describes the consequences of a malfunctioning switch on a system built for reliability.

At Cloudflare, we pride ourselves in our global network that spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. To accelerate all that traffic through our network, there are multiple technologies at play. So let’s have a look at one of the cornerstones that makes all of this work.

Tom Strickx’ epic deep dive into ASICs is here.

Let us know your thoughts and comments below or feel free to also reach out to us via our social media channels. And because we talked about careers in the beginning of this blog post, check out our available jobs if you are interested to join Cloudflare.

This is the story of two things that are deeply American: post-Thanksgiving shopping and scrappy entrepreneurs.

On the fourth Thursday in November, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving. The Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, is considered the official start of the holiday shopping season. It is typically the busiest (offline) shopping day of the year. Shopping after Thanksgiving is so deeply engrained in American culture that in 1939 in the midst of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on the last day of the month, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in order to get people out and spending more quickly.

Retailers today are attuned to this tradition and offer specials to lure customers to their stores. People literally will camp out for a week in front of some retailers in order to be the first in line when the stores open Friday morning. If you're reading this outside the United States and think it sounds crazy, rest assured that most of us here do as well. That said, suffice it to say that there is a high demand among many for the details of the Black Friday deals.

Just as American as shopping after Thanksgiving is the fact that if the market demands something, scrappy entrepreneurs will step up to meet that demand. In this case, the website 2011BlackFridayAds.com provides a one-stop resource to find out what all the biggest retailers will be offering. The site was created by Ty Price, who has been tracking Black Friday deals since 2008. This year, if you search Google for "Black Friday 2011," among the more than 71 million sites returned, Ty's is the first result.

Ty had been through this before and knew the amount of traffic to his site could spike significantly in the days leading up to Black Friday. So, in late September, he signed up for CloudFlare to help manage the coming load. Because 2011BlackFridayAds.com is hosted through MediaTemple, one of CloudFlare's hosting partners, setting up our service took literally two clicks and less than a minute. The graph below shows the growth in traffic over the last month, peaking in the last 24 hours at nearly 3 million page views a day (about 35 per second).

Turns out a lot of people want to see Black Friday deals, and we're proud to have helped ensure 2011BlackFridayAds.com stay up and running under crushing load. CloudFlare didn't just make the site safer and protect it from attacks, we also significantly reduced the load on the servers so they could keep up with visitors' requests. In fact, CloudFlare cut the number of requests that needed to be handled by the server by nearly half a billion, or about 75% of the total load it would have experienced without CloudFlare. We also saved the site more than 23 Terabytes, 93% of the bandwidth that would have otherwise been used serving the site's pages.

Any downtime experienced by a site is quickly punished by Google,meaning that even if you have an initially popular site, if you can't stay online you can't stay on top. CloudFlare helped 2011BlackFridayAds.com stay fast and reliable, even under a crushing load, and the effect has kept it at the top of the rankings and kept the traffic growing. Speed and reliability are the foundation of SEO.

As Ty just wrote me via email: "CloudFlare has done wonders for us this year. It's amazing how fast the site is." Helping ensure the sites of entrepreneurs like Ty could perform as well as the big companies' is why we — a scrappy group of entrepreneurs ourselves — built CloudFlare in the first place.

While Black Friday is the biggest offline retail shopping day, the Monday after Black Friday, a day now known as Cyber Monday, is reportedly the largest for online shopping. Everyone in the U.S. returns to work, still in a shopping mood, and takes any downtime at their desks to scour Internet retailers for gifts. If you're an online business, you literally can't afford to go down. And, if you're a eMerchant who finds yourself worried over the coming days that your site might fail, spend the few minutes it takes to sign up for CloudFlare. Our basic service is free (Ty uses the PRO version for$20/month), it doesn't require any technical skill to setup, and it will work regardless of your platform.

The biggest Internet retailer in the world is Amazon.com. As of today, CloudFlare powers 5x the traffic of Amazon. In other words, if you're worried about a crush of traffic to your website over the coming holiday season, we're here for you and happy to help.

For those camped out in front of a Walmart for Black Friday, stay warm and make sure to check 2011BlackFridayAds.com from your smart phone for a preview of the latest deals. For those watching from the sidelines, check back to these pages after Cyber Monday for reports on Internet traffic patterns we saw.

And, for those in the United States, have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

It's almost time at CloudFlare headquarters, in San Francisco, California, USA, to celebrate Thanksgiving. This holiday brings together family and friends to enjoy a meal and remember the people and events for which we are grateful.

We can't invite each member of our community to join us for Thanksgiving dinner, but we are grateful that so many worldwide are using CloudFlare to make their sites faster and safer. We serve a global community, with a global network, and we remember that every day, not just the holidays.

To make our service more accessible to this worldwide community, CloudFlare uses the Smartling platform to offer our website in 31 languages, all available from the menu at the bottom right of CloudFlare.com pages. Each language starts with machine translation, and then, using the Smartling in-page tools, the community goes to work.

In the few months since we began this community translation effort, our customers have translated 20,000 words in 16 languages. That's amazing.

Nearly 100 CloudFlare customers have translated portions of our website. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we recognize a few of the most prolific translators here, in no particular order.

• Mohammed Alamri

• Raquel Santos and Mariana Gaspar

• Mosi Wang

• SecNews Management Team

• Ardha Gp

• Emil Stahl Pedersen

• Cyrille Dumortier

• Heiko Rittelmeier

• Jorim Sint

• Bazyli Brzóska

• Gyönki Bendegúz

There are many others, not all of whom wanted to be recognized publicly. We're grateful to each one, and to Smartling for making this process simple for both the translator and site owner alike.

This same translation tool is available for your website on CloudFlare via the Smartlingapp.

Like to help us improve our global voice? Go to translate.cloudflare.com and register with your language(s).

For those celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, enjoy your turkey dinner and your time with family and friends. For the rest of the world -- including our Canadian customers who enjoyed Thanksgiving several weeks ago -- many thanks for helping make CloudFlare grow all around the world, in every language.

Thanks to Dain Kennison for the image.