50 Fun Facts about the internet

Here are 50 fun and surprising facts about the internet, ranging from its history and technology to pop culture oddities and wild statistics. Most people don’t know many of these quirky details:

Origins and Early History

• The modern internet traces back to ARPANET, launched in 1969.stacker+1​

• Email was invented in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson.webfx​

• The first spam email was sent in 1978 to about 400 people.webfx​

• The first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, is still online (info.cern.ch).w3+1​

• “Surfing the internet” was coined in 1992 by librarian Jean Armor Polly.syndacast​

• The term “Wi-Fi” doesn’t stand for anything and was created as a catchy name for wireless networking.webfx​

Growth and Usage

• There are over 1.7 billion websites today, with hundreds of thousands being launched daily.webfx​

• About 40% of the world’s population (over 3 billion people) have internet access.thefactfile​

• Only about 5% of online content is actually visible; the rest is part of the Deep Web.onder​

• Google processes over 99,000 searches every second.thefactfile​

• 16–20% of Google queries each day have never been searched before.syndacast​

• A single Google search uses around 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds.syndacast​

Cultural Milestones

• The Space Jam movie website, launched in 1996, is still online in its original form.syndacast​

• The first photo uploaded to the web was of a band called “Les Horribles Cernettes”, friends of Berners-Lee.webfx​

• The first “emoticon” 🙂 was used by computer scientist Scott Fahlman in 1982.thefactfile​

More Fun Tidbits

• The Netherlands was among the first countries with national internet access.onder​

• “Insurance” is Google’s most expensive AdWords keyword, costing over $50 per click.syndacast​

• China has over 900 million internet users, the most of any country.thefactfile​

• The internet weighs almost nothing—subatomic particles with data mean less than an egg.onder​

• North Korea has only about 28 websites accessible to its citizens.thefactfile​

• The most liked Instagram post as of 2021 was a photo of an egg.thefactfile​

• More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.thefactfile​

• The MP3 format, created in 1991, revolutionized music sharing.stacker​

Email, Browsing, and Social Media

• Over 300 billion emails are sent daily.webfx+1​

• The first webcam was used at Cambridge University to watch a coffee pot.thefactfile​

• Twitter’s iconic blue bird is named “Larry” after Larry Bird of NBA fame.thefactfile​

• Facebook hit 1 billion users in 2012.thefactfile​

Strange but True

• The first item ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer.thefactfile​

• Only 1% of all internet traffic is actually visible web browsing—the rest is from bots or the Deep Web.onder​

• About 22% of the world’s population uses Facebook monthly.thefactfile​

• Over 90% of the world’s currency exists only on computers.thefactfile​

Security and Weird World Records

• The biggest DDoS attack in history reached over 2.5 Tbps (terabits per second).thefactfile​

• Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for inventing the World Wide Web.thefactfile​

• The longest domain name has 63 characters (excluding the .com).thefactfile​

• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has hundreds of billions of site snapshots.stacker​

Unique Platforms and Miscellaneous

• Wikipedia has over 6 million English articles—making it orders of magnitude bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.thefactfile​

• The “You’ve Got Mail!” sound from AOL is still online.syndacast​

• In 2012, hackers briefly knocked most of the world’s internet offline using BGP attacks.thefactfile​

• The largest image ever uploaded online is over 365 gigapixels.thefactfile​

• “The Dress” optical illusion was one of the fastest spreading viral events in history.thefactfile​

More Surprising Stats

• Approximately 70% of all web traffic is video.thefactfile​

• Over half of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices.thefactfile​

• Estonia was the first country to allow online voting in a general election.thefactfile​

• The most retweeted tweet ever is from a Japanese billionaire giving away money.thefactfile​

• Roughly 40% of marriages in the US began with an online meeting.thefactfile​

• The World Wide Web and the Internet are not the same thing! The web is just one part of the broader internet.thefactfile​

These facts show how vast, quirky, and surprising the history and culture of the internet truly are.stacker+4​