Linux, a free, open-source operating system, runs most of the internet’s servers, yet it remains a niche choice on consumer PCs. For years, Linux’s desktop market share in North America generally hovered in the low single digits. However, reports began popping up earlier this week that Linux’s market share had doubled, from the usual 3% to 5% to around 10%. And it happened quickly — in just a few weeks between May and June.

Statcounter, which provides usage stats helpful to webmasters and cybersecurity professionals, measures website visits, including the operating system used to access the website. Statcounter can’t tell if it’s a human or a bot visiting a website, but the Linux uptick was corroborated by data from Cloudflare, an internet network company that provides many web-based services, such as content delivery and cybersecurity. 

Cloudflare senior product manager Lai Yi Ohlsen told CNET via email that the company’s data, which measures HTTP requests by operating system, shows Linux accounted for 9.8% of US-based internet traffic from July 4 to Aug. 1, closely aligning with the Statcounter metric.

Cloudflare’s data suggests the jump isn’t primarily due to more Americans browsing the web on Linux, however. When the company applies its “likely human” filter to the same July 4 to Aug. 1 dataset, Linux’s share falls from 9.8% to 6.4% — a figure much closer to the operating system’s typical usage levels.

No dataset is perfect, but Linux could now be responsible for more automated web activity. One possible explanation for such a sharp increase over a short period is that one or more large web services dramatically increased their Linux-based activity, such as data scraping, automated crawling or cloud infrastructure workloads.

The growing use of AI agents could also be a contributing factor. AI agents are bots that automatically do things on your behalf with minimal oversight.

The exact reason for the recent increase in Linux traffic is still unclear. It’s worth noting, however, that in June, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said bots now generate more web traffic than humans. If that’s the case, shifts in automated traffic could significantly affect operating system usage metrics derived from web requests.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Prince said in a post on X on June 3. “Thought it would be [at the] end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”

The Linux Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Julian is a contributor and former staff writer at CNET.

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