Landscape of API Traffic

The use of APIs has grown significantly over the past year, with APIs now accounting for more than half of all internet traffic. This growth is driven by changes in how applications are built, the rise of API-first businesses, and increased machine-to-machine communication. Industries such as Banking, Retail, and Financial Services have experienced the largest increase in API usage. The majority of API traffic comes from POST or GET requests, with JSON being the most commonly used payload encoding protocol. Encryption is key to securing APIs against snooping and tampering, with TLS v1.3 being the most adopted protocol. Cloudflare's security systems block malicious HTML requests twice as often as API requests, with common issues including non-compliant requests, rate limiting, and authentication/authorization problems.