Total eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Iceland, Spain, and Portugal

At a time when looking down at our devices is a ritual in daily life, a natural phenomenon that demands our attention communally upward is a welcome event. On Wednesday, August 12, a total solar eclipse swept from the North Atlantic across Europe, moving over Iceland and northern Spain and Portugal, with a deep partial eclipse over the rest of Western Europe, all near local sunset. This was the first total solar eclipse to cross mainland Europe in twenty years, and it drew millions outdoors to witness the moon pass between Earth and the sun. 

As we saw during the 2026 World Cup and the last total eclipse in 2024, online behavior is noticeably affected when an event at this scale takes place. In this blog post, we’ll use data from Cloudflare Radar to examine how Internet traffic shifted alongside the moon and the sun.  

Internet traffic dips align precisely with maximum obscuration

In the figure above, we measured HTTP request volume in five-minute buckets across the affected countries on eclipse day, and compared it to a normal-day baseline. Each row is a country (except for Alaska) and each column is a five-minute slice of August 12, 2026, the day of the eclipse. The countries appear above in the order in which they saw the eclipse.

The black diamonds mark the moment of maximum eclipse and the color shows the percent change in HTTP traffic versus the baseline (red = below normal, blue = above). We can see very clearly that the black diamonds overlay the darkest red, almost perfectly, signaling that as the eclipse deepened, Internet traffic decreased. The decrease was most significant along the path of totality and in countries that saw the deepest partial eclipse (Iceland, Ireland, the UK, France, Spain and Portugal) and all but absent where the sun was barely obscured (Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland).