Election Day Traffic Dips While Polls Are Open, Spikes at Results Time
France held the first round of its 2022 presidential election on Sunday, April 10, 2022, with a run-off scheduled for April 24 between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Cloudflare Radar data shows that while Election Day was not a typical Sunday for internet traffic in France, the shifts were concentrated around voting hours and the release of results.
Using the seven-day view, traffic on April 10 was lower than the previous Sunday between 08:00 and 16:00 UTC (10:00 to 18:00 local time). That window falls inside the period when polling stations were open—from 08:00 to 19:00 local time, or 20:00 in large cities. The largest gap compared to the prior Sunday came at 14:00 UTC (16:00 local), when traffic dropped by as much as 16%. This pattern echoes what was seen during the Portuguese legislative election in January 2022.
A closer look at the four Sundays from March 20 through April 10 reveals a more nuanced picture. Election Day saw the most traffic of the previous month at 06:30 UTC (08:30 local) and during several stretches between 16:30 and 20:45 UTC (18:30 to 22:45 local). Conversely, it had the least traffic of the month between 09:45 and 11:15 UTC (11:45 to 13:15 local) and ranked third-lowest of the four Sundays from 12:15 to 16:15 UTC (14:15 to 18:15 local).
This suggests that more people than usual were online before heading to the polls at around 08:30 local time, but traffic dropped noticeably in the late morning and again after lunch, just before the polling stations closed. Once the first exit polls were published at roughly 18:40 local time, with the main projections arriving at 20:00 local time when all stations had closed, traffic surged to its highest level compared to the previous 30 Sundays.
Mobile devices played a significant role in that shift. On Election Day, mobile usage accounted for 60% of internet traffic at around 09:00 local time and spiked again at 21:00 with 58%. The seven-day average for mobile in France is 48%.
Official Result Pages See Massive Late-Night Surge
Official election sites are typically quiet outside of voting windows, but the release of results changes that. DNS request trends for elections.interieur.gouv.fr, which publishes the official returns, showed increasing traffic throughout the week after Monday, April 4. On Election Day proper, two major spikes stood out. The first, around 20:00 local time, saw 370% more DNS requests than the previous Sunday at the same hour—right when the first major polls were revealed. The larger spike came at midnight local time, once 84% of votes were counted and Macron was leading with 27% followed by Le Pen at 25%. At that point, traffic was up 925% compared to the previous Sunday at the same time.
News Outlets Peak at 20:00, Radio Spikes Again Late
Aggregate DNS trends across 12 French news websites showed the week's largest surge on Election Day around 20:00 local time, with 116% more traffic than the previous Sunday at the same hour. But activity began to build earlier: after 16:00 local time, traffic to news outlets started climbing, hitting steady growth until 20:00. Another uptick arrived at 23:00, followed by a decline—though by Monday morning at 08:00, traffic was already higher than the prior week's baseline, excluding Election Day.
French television station websites showed a sharper, more isolated spike. At 20:00 local time, when the main exit polls landed, these domains saw a 472% increase in traffic versus the previous Sunday. Broadcast radio websites followed a similar arc, with a 272% jump at 20:00 and an even larger 300% spike at 23:00 local time. Monday morning traffic to radio sites also ran 82% higher than the prior week's levels.
Social Media Largely Unaffected
Aggregate DNS traffic for social media platforms in France showed no significant election-driven change. Requests were slightly lower than the previous Sunday, suggesting that news websites and official result portals drew the attention while social feeds remained comparatively steady.
France did not see the kind of connectivity drop seen in nations that shut down the internet during elections. Instead, the data shows a more subtle behavioral shift: people step away during voting hours and come back in force once results begin streaming in. All the underlying trends are visible via Cloudflare Radar.
