How the Internet reacted to Covid-19: A perspective from Facebook's Edge Network

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented changes in the way people interact with each other, which as a consequence has increased pressure on the Internet. In this paper we provide a perspective of the scale of Internet traffic growth and how well the Internet coped with the increased demand as seen from Facebooks edge network. We use this infrastructure serving multiple large social networks and their related family of apps as vantage points to analyze how traffic and product properties changed over the course of the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that there have been changes in traffic demand, user behavior and user experience. We also show that different regions of the world saw different magnitudes of impact with predominantly less developed regions exhibiting larger performance degradations.