Huge internet usage peak at 9.20pm last night: Football fans watching Liverpool and gamers streaming Call of Duty update triggered ‘record spike’
- Liverpool’s football game against Villarreal prompted surge in internet usage
- Gamers streaming the latest Call of Duty update also promoted the huge spike
Football fans streaming Liverpool’s win over Villarreal in the Champions League semi-final and gamers downloading the latest Call of Duty Warzone Season 3 update, led to a record spike in internet usage last night, new network data from TalkTalk has revealed.
A peak record of 8.715Tbps, the equivalent to downloading 363 hours of HD video per second, was set on TalkTalk’s network last night at 9.20pm, overtaking the previous record of 8.345Tbps set in December 2021.
Phil Haslam, chief technology officer at the telecoms giant, said: ‘A peak in April is very unusual, especially with good weather.
‘It’s a reminder of the ever-growing demand for great Wi-Fi and full fibre broadband.’
What were you watching? TalkTalk enjoyed a record spike in internet usage last night at about 9.20pm
TalkTalk said streaming and online gaming had surged on its network in the last two years, prompting a hefty 40 per cent spike in internet usage.
This increase is spread across TalkTalk’s customer base, with broadband usage among over 65s up by 23 per cent this year.
Previous research from TalkTalk showed that 41 per cent of people said they were streaming more content than they were before the pandemic, while one in ten had taken up online gaming.
Along with TalkTalk, other internet service providers experienced a marked surge in traffic and internet usage last night.
Aggregated traffic data from the London Internet Exchange, which it should be noted does not cover every internet service provider, suggests total traffic hit a peak of around 6.95Tbps just before 8.30pm, which is considerably higher than the peaks seen over the last few days.
TalkTalk will be using sophisticated Content Delivery Networks and systems to help manage surges in traffic, which caches popular content closer in the network to end-users.
Game time: Football fans streaming Liverpool’s win over Villarreal in the Champions League helped trigger a surge in internet usage last night, TalkTalk says
Virgin Media 02 also enjoyed a spike in usage last night, driven by the Call of Duty Update.
It said: ‘During the evening peak period between 8-10pm, traffic was up 11.9 per cent on average and up 23.8 per cent on the previous week, as gamers rushed to download the latest update which went live on Wednesday.
‘Over the course of the evening (4pm-12am), the average Virgin Media user consumed 12.1GB of data, up nearly a third (29 per cent) on the previous week.’
Jeanie York, chief technology officer at Virgin Media O2, said: ‘With Triple-A games studios continuing to issue huge updates, and customers racing to get their hands on the latest releases, the growth in network traffic we saw during lockdown is here to stay: 2022 is set to be another record-breaking year for data usage.’
Surge: A chart from London Internet Exchange shows online traffic surged just before 8.30pm
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