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How we measure
In short
A country’s score for last night comes from two things: what its visitors voted, and an estimate from how many people were online in the small hours. While votes are few the estimate leads; from 30 votes on, only votes count.
Votes
One answer per browser per day, on a scale from 1 (terribly) to 5 (great). The country comes from the connection. A country’s vote score is the plain average of its answers for that morning.
Night-time internet activity
For 65 countries we read Cloudflare Radar’s hourly web traffic from people (bots removed) between 02:00 and 05:00 local time. Each night is compared with the median of the same weekday over the previous eight weeks (100 = as usual), then ranked among that country’s nights of the past year. A night busier than half of them scores below 3.4, a quieter one above: score = 4.2 − 0.016 × the share of quieter nights in percent, so between 2.6 and 4.2.
Phones in bed
The same calculation runs on traffic from phones and tablets alone, which is closer to people lying awake than all traffic (that also holds night shifts and machines left on). Where both exist, their rankings are averaged.
Mixing votes and the estimate
The estimate weighs as much as ten votes: score = (votes × their average + 10 × estimate) ÷ (votes + 10). From 30 votes on, the estimate is dropped. Countries shown from the estimate alone are drawn paler and marked “≈”.
When there is no estimate
Traffic also falls when the internet itself is down, which would read as a wonderful night. So nights with an outage on Cloudflare Radar’s outage list, and nights when traffic is more than a quarter below its usual level, get no estimate. The map says so when you point at the country.
What may have played a part
Pointing at a country also shows what happened there that night: earthquakes, cyclones, floods, eruptions and wildfires (GDACS), unusual heat, gales, thunderstorms and bad air in its largest cities (Open-Meteo), internet outages and their cause (Cloudflare Radar), public holidays (Nager.Date), clock changes, Ramadan and a hand-kept list of big nights such as New Year’s Eve or elections. These explain; they do not change the score.
Tonight’s forecast
The forecast is a separate, simple points model: it starts at 3.5 and each factor adds or takes away a little (a hot night up to −0.8, a weekend morning +0.1, and so on). The weights follow the strength of the published evidence, listed on the “What the research says” page.
Search data: planned
How often people search for insomnia and “can’t sleep” at night (Google Trends) would be a second, independent estimate. The pipeline is built but not switched on; it does not affect any number on the site.
Limits
Night-time traffic measures who is awake, not how well the others slept. The constants in the formulas are our choices, not fitted to data yet; once enough people vote, we will tune them to the votes and say so here. With few votes a country’s score can swing on a single answer.