Europa League matches helped push internet traffic to record levels on September 17, with DE-CIX Frankfurt recording more than 20 terabits per second (Tbit/s) of data for the first time.
Europe’s largest internet exchange reached a peak of exactly 20.02 Tbit/s as millions of football fans across the continent watched European competition matches. At the same time, combined data throughput across DE-CIX’s global internet exchanges surpassed 30 Tbit/s for the first time, setting a new global milestone.
The 20 Tbit/s peak recorded in Frankfurt is equivalent to around 11 million TikTok videos being streamed simultaneously. According to DE-CIX, if the amount of data transmitted every second were printed on paper, it would create a stack around 16 times higher than Mount Everest.
Peak traffic at DE-CIX Frankfurt has increased by approximately 140 per cent since the beginning of 2020, more than doubling in less than seven years.
“When millions of people stream soccer at the same time, enormous data streams are generated within a matter of moments,” said Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “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.”
Ivanov added that live sports provide a clear illustration of a broader trend driven by streaming, cloud services, gaming and artificial intelligence, all of which are contributing to continued growth in global data traffic and increasing demand for high-performance and resilient digital infrastructure.
DE-CIX operates more than 60 internet and cloud exchanges across Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Its global interconnection ecosystem connects more than 4,600 networks across more than 100 countries.
In 2025, nearly 48 exabytes of data were exchanged through DE-CIX Frankfurt, which connects almost 1,100 networks.
The latest figures underline the growing infrastructure demands created by live sports streaming, as major football events increasingly generate significant spikes in internet traffic within short periods.