TL;DR:
• A night of European soccer sent internet traffic to record levels, with DE-CIX Frankfurt exceeding 20 Tbit/s.
• Meanwhile DE-CIX’s global exchanges collectively passing 30 Tbit/s for the first time.
• The milestones demonstrate both live sport’s power to generate huge, sudden traffic surges and the growing importance of resilient internet infrastructure as streaming, cloud services, gaming and AI push global data volumes ever higher.
While millions of soccer fans across Europe watched European League competition matches on the evening of Thursday 18 September, the Internet was also running at full speed. At DE-CIX Frankfurt, Europe’s largest Internet Exchange, more than 20 terabits per second (Tbit/s) were transmitted for the first time – 20.02 Tbit/s to be precise.
At the same time, data throughput across DE-CIX’s global Internet Exchanges hit the 30 Tbit/s mark for the first time – a new global milestone.
The data throughput of 20 terabits per second in Frankfurt is equivalent to approximately 11 million TikTok videos being streamed simultaneously. If printed on paper, this amount of data every second would result in a stack about 16 times taller than Mount Everest. Since the beginning of 2020, peak data traffic at DE-CIX Frankfurt has more than doubled – growth of about 140%.
“When millions of people stream soccer at the same time, enormous data streams are generated within a matter of moments. The fact that we’re seeing two new thresholds on a single evening – 20 terabits per second in Frankfurt and 30 terabits per second across all locations – demonstrates the impressive scale that digital data traffic has now reached,” says Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “Live sports make this development particularly visible. Behind it lies a long-term trend: streaming, the cloud, gaming, and AI are driving continuous growth in global data traffic and making high-performance, resilient digital infrastructure increasingly important.”
DE-CIX Frankfurt is one of the world’s largest Internet Exchanges and a central data hub in Europe. Through direct data exchange between network operators, cloud providers, content platforms, and companies, data reaches its destination via the shortest possible routes. This reduces latency, increases reliability, and helps ensure that digital services remain stable and accessible even during periods of exceptionally high demand.
Today, DE-CIX operates more than 60 Internet and Cloud Exchanges in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The global interconnection ecosystem connects more than 4,600 networks from over 100 countries. In 2025, nearly 48 exabytes of data were exchanged at DE-CIX Frankfurt, where nearly 1,100 networks are connected.
