Euro 2024 traffic dip: how much do fans tune out?

With around 3.5 billion fans worldwide, football holds a unique place in global culture. For the countries competing in UEFA Euro 2024 (running June 14 – July 14, 2024), a match involving the national team can measurably shift how the entire country uses the internet. Cloudflare's network, spanning data centers in over 320 cities, gives us a good vantage point to observe these effects on HTTP request traffic.

Broadcast type matters. When a game airs on free-to-air national TV, traffic typically drops as attention moves to the television. Paid or closed channels sometimes produce the opposite effect, with traffic rising among the subset of fans without access. The opening England match on June 16 shows how mixed the picture has become: BBC One drew 15 million viewers, while BBC iPlayer recorded 3.5 million streams for the same game, suggesting that even national broadcasters are pushing streaming options.

The numbers behind the drops

Across the first round of group games (ending June 19), we observed significant dips in HTTP requests for several nations. The most pronounced declines, at least 12% below the previous week's levels, appeared in:

  • Germany (host nation)
  • Netherlands
  • Turkey
  • Belgium
  • Croatia
  • Slovakia
  • Serbia

Western European countries and Germany's neighbors featured prominently in the data. England and Scotland saw near-identical drops of 8% and 6% respectively during their matches. Notably, Albania, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and Slovenia were the only countries where request volume actually increased during national team games.

Splitting the traffic by category, social media usage tended to spike during halftime and in the periods just before and after matches. Categories like AI chatbots, e-commerce, productivity tools, and financial services saw the expected decreases during game time.

Opening night in Germany

The tournament's launch day, June 14, offered a clear example of game-driven traffic patterns. From the start of the opening ceremony around 18:45 UTC (20:45 local), German traffic dropped 11% relative to the previous week. When Germany played Scotland from 19:00 UTC, the drop deepened to 12%. Halftime offered a brief reprieve, with traffic recovering to just 4% below the prior week, but the second half saw it fall again to 11% lower. After the final whistle at midnight UTC, requests were down 19% as celebrations took hold.

DDoS activity alongside the matches

The tournament period has also seen notable attack traffic within Germany. We observed application layer DDoS attacks against various targets, including a translation tool, a data protection service, a search engine, and a local government website. The largest single event occurred on June 15, the day after the opening match, targeting the translation service. This attack peaked at 105 million requests per hour around 23:00 UTC and lasted roughly two hours. Looking more closely, it hit a peak of 1.74 million requests per second (rps) at 23:40 UTC, following an initial spike of 147,000 rps at 21:04 UTC.

The group stage continues, and national team football remains a powerful force for pulling attention away from digital services. Even with the rise of live score apps, minute-by-minute sports journalism, and increasingly rich betting platforms, the broadcast match itself still dominates the evening for many fans. We will be tracking these trends daily throughout the tournament and posting game-day impact observations on X.