Are you currently experiencing an attack?
Are you currently experiencing an attack?
This new situation is making us change the way we conduct business. If once we could just go out to the store and buy what we need, now we try to do anything we can online. From buying groceries to every day-to-day activity you can think of, we do what we can via the Internet. This, of course, has had a major impact on websites’ incoming traffic around the world. In Ireland, for example, they saw a rise of 50% in the country’s web traffic. According to Comcast, “Weekday usage of VoIP and video conferencing applications is up 212 percent while VPN traffic has increased roughly 40 percent, the result of more people moving to work and learn from home environments.”
Even before COVID-19, the Internet was an important factor in our lives. During this outbreak, it has become a vital and indispensable tool that not only helps us to continue working, but also helps us to continue managing our day-to-day lives.
We analyzed incoming traffic data by business sector from February and compared it with the incoming traffic data from March, which is the month that we felt the effects of COVID-19. Some of the results were to be expected but some took us by surprise.
Of course, we would expect that websites for online retailers would have seen an increase in traffic but what we actually saw was an increase in unforeseen places. Government websites that in normal days handle several thousand requests per month saw a spike in incoming traffic. For example, the Israeli Employment Bureau saw a massive increase in traffic and inquiries. Many lost their jobs due to the virus outbreak and went online to register for unemployment and physical registration in the bureau’s branches wasn’t an option anymore.
