IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

And still, in the year of our lord 2026, GitHub does not support IPv6.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539

Tailscale have a great FAQ about IPv4 vs IPv6: https://tailscale.com/docs/reference/faq/ipv6

If you're not an expert in this area it's worth a read - I certainly learned a few things!

It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them. Maybe even 75 years might be too optimistic? They are literally going to do everything in their power to avoid the transition, either being dragged out kicking and screaming or throwing their hands up and saying they can't support IPv6 because it costs too much.

Try going IPv6-only by disabling IPv4 on your computer as a test and notice that almost nothing works except Google. End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.

Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4.

If GitHub flipped a switch and enabled IPv6 it would instantly break many of their customers who have configured IP based access controls [1]. If the customer's network supports IPv6, the traffic would switch, and if they haven't added their IPv6 addresses to the policy ... boom everything breaks.

This is a tricky problem; providers don't have an easy way to correlate addresses or update policies pro-actively. And customers hate it when things suddenly break no matter how well you go about it.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...

Zoom in on that graph using the controls at the bottom, and you'll see a repeating pattern of crests and troughs, weekly. There's about a 5% difference between the crests and the troughs: the crests are hitting the 50% line or just below it, and the troughs are down around 45%.

The real question is, why are the crests so predictable? They're always on Saturdays; Sunday dips down a little below the crest, then Monday-Friday is down in the 45% range before the next Saturday jumps up to 50% again. (Fridays usually have a small rise, up to the 46-47% area).

My theory: mobile access rises on weekends. People are more often accessing Google services from their work computers Monday-Friday, but on Saturdays and Sundays most (not all) people are away from the office. Many of them will end up using smartphones rather than laptops for Internet access, for various reasons such as being outdoors. And since smartphones are nearly all using IPv6 these days, that means an uptick in IPv6 usage over the weekends.

I get an IPv6 address from my ISP (a /56 I believe), but I wish there was some good information on how to update my OpenWRT VLAN configuration, routing, and firewall rules to be able to support native IPv6 on my devices. Would love to be able to have direct IPv6 connections to the internet from my devices, but I want to make sure I can do it safely.

Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:

- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't

- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way

This google metric measures adoption in access networks, but at this point I feel more interesting metric is adoption in services.

One such stat is here:

> adoption ranging from 71% among the top 100 to 32% in the long tail

https://commoncrawl.org/blog/ipv6-adoption-across-the-top-10...

Getting full coverage on AWS (/GCP/Azure) and few other key services (GitHub...) would be significant here imho.

A hidden benefit is it's no longer possible to have another "we typed the wrong IP address" raid story. IPv6 is larger than the total number of heartbeats of all heart-bearing life that has ever existed. You either nailed the abuse address or you're raiding something that doesn't even exist.

As a French national, I am surprised to discover we are topping the charts according to this analysis.

Does anybody know why that might be the case? What's the story of IPv6 deployment in France?

It amuses me to see that according to the map, France is best in class or close to be, while just a few weeks ago, my ISP in France stopped providing me IPv6 connectivity…

The story is that at the beginning I had IPv6, and a shared dynamic IPv4 behind a CGNAT, I asked for a rollback to a full duplex static IPv4 and for three years I had both a static personal IPv4 and an IPv6. A few weeks ago my router went down and since it went back up, I no longer have an IPv6 address. I called my ISP and they explained that I could either have IPv6 or a static IPv4, but not both, and that it's abnormal that I had both for so long… welp, it's sad to see IPv6 but getting it back is not worth abandoning my static IPv4 and going back to a dynamic shared IPv4.

NB: this is not "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark" but "availability of IPv6 connectivity among Google users", which is a very important difference. This means roughly half of Google users have IPv6 capability, which does not 1:1 correspond how much traffic is actually transferred over IPv6, which is what this submission says in the title.

It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1]

This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/14/apples-first-mac-with-5g-cell...

The question is, "what will the graph look like in the next 10 years?"

I get the whole s-curve trend but if I squint at 2017, there is an inflection to slow the s-curve down.

Annoyingly, when setting up service with a fiber company in the last couple months, I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes." Turns out "yes, but not in my region."

It's been amazingly linear since 2014.

amazon.com needs to get with the program. Still IPv4 only.

Meanwhile: one of the major mobile network in my country announced cisco collab/ipv6 ~5 years ago, but still doesn't provide v6, just v4 CGNAT.

Personal web server running dual stack since early 2010s currently sees 18-20% v6 traffic. When split by type, counting only mobile users it reaches 30% at peak.

Bot/crawler traffic is ironically 100% v4.

Meanwhile: enabled h3 in september last year for the fun of it, instantly at >40% traffic by request count, passing 50% since the beginning of the year, h2 accounting almost all the remaining traffic and plain ssl/http requests <1% being just bots.

What I have asked myself the last few months: I've read about IPv4 becoming sparce a few years ago. I haven't read much about it lately. And I've thought maybe the advance of cloud computing and load balancer kind of mitigated the issue of sparce IP4?

Just in time for ipv8 - https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html

I consistently get 100x as many captchas from google over V6 as over V4, on many different networks: it is obnoxious and obviously broken on their end.

Current submission title:

> IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

Graph description:

> The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6

There are reasons to expect both much more and much less traffic per user on IPv6 compared to IPv4...

One of the foremost obstacles to wide adoption is that IPv4 still works great and it's ubiquitous. There is no advantage or up-side to deprecating or abandoning IPv4 support at all. The only result of disabling IPv4 is a denial of service to a certain sector of customers or clients.

The only way this will change is by increasing pressure on the resource of IPv4 networks. It was a few years ago that AWS broke the news to me that I'd be paying for IPv4 addresses but IPv6 would remain free. If enough services are forced, financially, to abandon an IPv4 presence, then their clients would be likewise forced to adopt IPv6 in order to retain connectivity.

But with the ubiquity of CGNAT and other technologies, it seems unrealistic that IPv4 will become so rare that it becomes prohibitively expensive, or must be widely abandoned. So that availability of the legacy protocol will inhibit widespread adoption and transitions to IPv6.

I am in the middle of building infrastructure in GCP. The workload is your typical stateless web + db workload.

As of now, there is no way to have a 100% internal ipv6. Many of the services, including CloudSQL or the connection between external and internal load balancers do not support ipv6, even when the external load balancer support ipv6 forwarding rules at the front end.

This means that careful internal ipv4 allocations still matter.

Everyone's saying progress is slow, but maybe this is just how long it takes to do massive decentralized global migrations affecting billions of people. What are we comparing against? Maybe the ICE-to-EV transition?

My next project, IPv6 in my homelab. It will be a challenge but it is time. My ISP gives me a static /48, I should use it.

Random test site for the consumer side: https://test-ipv6.com/

0/10 in Latvia with a local ISP, fun times.

I wish EU make it mandatory at least for all ISP to make mandatory support for IPv6 by end of this decade. I think that would push the needle even globally.

Can someone reconcile for me the constant chatter about how IPv6 isn't getting impemented, versus this result that more than half of all traffic (as measured by google) is now IPv6?

It sounds to me like its a tool which is available to be used when needed and when no better workarounds exist, and it is slowly but surely being adopted as needed.

Setting up my own server (migrating off GCP LB) taught me so much about networking. I was especially surprised that providing IPv6 is such a performance boost for low bandwidth phones since they mostly only operate on IPv6 by now and IPv4 needs some sort of special roundtrip.

As long as no significant websites are IPv6-only qnd no significant user base is IPv6-only, why would anyone join IPv6? What proponents could do is make their websites IPv6-only. The IETF website, for instance, should be IPv6-only.

Currently my IPS provides IPv6, but I set up my firewall in the access router of my home LAN to block all IPv6 in both directions.

- I don't want to have a permanent global unchanged ipv6 as in id of my traffic.

- IPv6 privacy extensions would change that but then I can not reach my two devices I do want to reach from outside anymore as my access router only supports DynDNS for its own address and no NAT in IPv6

This is only 33 years after I took a networking class and learned all about IPv6 and the IPv4 address space crisis.

I am aware of at least 2 telecoms, one publicly traded, that have very little to no IPv6 in their core networks and only use IPv6 when they have to.

Personally I think the design of IPv6 offers very little benefit; supposedly the Dept of Defense/Dept of War holds some 175 million IPv4 addresses, with other companies also holding large allocations - that should have been addressed 25-30 years ago as an administrative matter.

My interest was piqued 20 years ago, then there was talk about Internet2 with all these amazing optimisations.

Things have developed so much, a Internet2 is still going on I take it, however is more focussed on university research.

As ever a killer strength is something that draws people to a new technology, I imagine there's various demographics that benefit from use of ipv6.

Further I imagine that there are some levels of criticality which when reached are more self sustaining (dare I say it the network effect?).

I've been posting this graph over the years, and it really has slowed down hugely close to this 50%. This is a global ipv6 support, so some countries are racing ahead, others weirdly like Denmark have a stash of ipv4 addresses and seems content.

France and Germany are at about 80%, but there's the rest of the world of course.

Good.

I think most of us know that their design failure here was a lack of backwards compatibility. But at least it's getting adopted.

Are any ISP's or corp intranets doing IPv6-mostly style networks yet: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-link-v6ops-6mops-00.ht...

That seems to be a promising approach.

meanwhile I just disabled ipv6 on all my vm's last night due to ubuntu package servers being down and needing to get something critical out the door.

And yet I still haven't ever connected to an internet provider that supports IPv6, across two countries I spend time in...

Finally https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9558/50-of-users-access-... can resolve!

I wonder why Germany has a relative high adoption rate with 77%? They are normally behind when it comes to new technology.

Is it because they have more carrier NAT?

In Denmark I can get cheap 1 / 1 Gbit/s fiber, but still no ipv6 :(

The failure wasn't in the technical design of v6, but in the economic assumption. When the cost of migration exceeds the cost of 'hacks' like NAT, people will stick to the hacks for as long as humanly possible.

I was wondering why someone proposed IPv8

Every year I just wish someone will come up with IPv4-with-more-bytes and we can switch to it before IPv6 gets another percent usage share.

Countries like India have higher adoption (>70%) because of 4G/5G abundance. Legacy broadband providers hold back IPv6 usage.

They have released the draft for IPv8 two days ago: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html

Does it mean we better put our chips on IPv8?

And in the mean time, Odido on the Netherlands still don’t support ipv6 on their fiber network…

This is the global curve, it looks to be flattening I had thought it would be more asymptotic to 100%.

My company is ipv4 still, and some customers are having issues with ipv6 only connections.

Also we log the ip addresses, and that's only in ipv4.

Interesting to see Spain having such low IPv6 adoption. Perhaps that's exacerbated the issues caused there by blocking IPs during football matches that we've seen mentioned in recent HN posts.

Puma 8.0+ webserver now defaults to IPv6

And Virgin Media in the UK still doesn't support IPv6

while it looks like its slowing down, I am pretty sure it will speed up once IPv4 get even more expensive, sites start to be hosted on IPv6 only and become inaccessible to some users that dont have IPv4. Thats surely going to put pressure on ISPs