After a wait of almost a month, the UEFA Champions League returned on 13 October. In addition to seeing strong performances by Barcelona, Arsenal, FC Bruges and Athletico Madrid on the pitch, there was a commensurate robust performance on global networks hosting streaming video of the games, with traffic hitting new highs according to data from DE-CIX.
Major live events significantly increase demand for simultaneous access to digital content and, with it, the load on the underlying network infrastructure. The new record values coincided with numerous UEFA Champions League matches and showed how increasing numbers of football fans followed the games via streaming platforms.
The leading internet exchange provider said that its exchange in Frankfurt hit 21.47 Tbps for the first time, just 25 days after it first crossed 20 Tbps, while global traffic across DE-CIX’s exchanges passed 32 Tbps. Both peaks came 20 minutes after kick-off in Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League matches, as fans streamed the games live. The data traffic in Frankfurt was equal to around 12 million TikTok videos streamed at once.
Both records were measured at 21:20 Central European Summer Time, just 20 minutes after kick-off in numerous UEFA Champions League matches. In all, the first night of the Champions League Matchday saw seven games across Europe – from London, Madird, Istanbul, Milan, Leipzig, Stavanger and Villareal – kick off at 21:00 CET.
Internet traffic has been growing steadily for years, however DE-CIX stressed that the pace of this development has now accelerated. These new traffic levels are said to have come just over three weeks after the last records were set, with peak traffic values having increased by around 7%.
On 17-18 September 2026, DE-CIX Frankfurt traffic exceeded the 20-terabit mark for the first time, reaching 20.02 Tbps, while global traffic surpassed the 30 Tbps threshold. The spike was said to have been generated by fans watching UEFA Europa League and Europa Conference League competition matches at this time.
DE-CIX said these new records underline the growing importance of high-performance digital infrastructure in an increasingly connected world. “Just three-and-a-half weeks ago, we crossed the 20 Tbps mark in Frankfurt for the first time. Now we are already at almost 21.5 terabits, and worldwide at more than 32 terabits. This momentum is remarkable and demonstrates the scale that digital traffic has now reached,” said CEO Ivo Ivanov.
“Live sports make this development particularly visible when millions of people access digital content simultaneously. Behind this lies a long-term trend: streaming, cloud services, gaming and increasingly artificial intelligence are changing the requirements placed on our networks. High-performance, direct and resilient connections are becoming ever more important for the digital economy.”
DE-CIX Frankfurt is one of the largest Internet Exchanges in the world and serves as a central data hub for Europe. Since the beginning of 2020, peak traffic at DE-CIX Frankfurt has increased by more than 160%. In 2025, nearly 48 exabytes of data were exchanged at DE-CIX Frankfurt, where almost 1,100 networks are connected.
Overall, DE-CIX operates more than 60 internet, cloud and AI exchanges across North and South America, EMEA and Asia. Its global interconnection ecosystem connects more than 4,600 networks from over 100 countries.
