Cloudflare reveals what’s behind major internet outages
Storms, earthquakes, and infrastructure failures disrupted internet access throughout the second quarter, while governments deliberately shut networks down, according to Cloudflare’s latest Internet Disruption Summary.
Based on Cloudflare Radar traffic data, the report covers internet disruptions recorded between April and June 2026.
Governments switching access on and off
Iran began restoring nationwide internet access on May 26, ending an 88-day shutdown that began on February 28. Traffic hit 40% of pre-shutdown levels the next day.
“Since then, we have seen HTTP bytes climb to as high as 90% before settling back to roughly 59% of pre-shutdown levels,” said Lai Yi Ohlsen, Senior Product Manager at Cloudflare.
“This volume is consistent with the traffic we observed in February, a window between this recent shutdown and a previous one in January, suggesting that connectivity has returned to something like its most recent pre-shutdown baseline rather than fully normalizing.”
Elsewhere in the region, damage to physical infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain has kept traffic to an AWS cloud region in the UAE low since March. AWS reported that drone strikes hit two facilities in the UAE, while another strike near a Bahrain facility caused physical damage.
“The decreased traffic is the downstream signature of physical damage to the underlying data center infrastructure rather than a network fault, and it continues to affect the websites and applications hosted in that region, regardless of their own availability,” noted Ohlsen.
Exam season brought its usual round of shutdowns. Iraq ordered three government-mandated blackouts, on June 2, 11, and 28, and Sudan ordered ten between April 13 and 23, all meant to stop students from cheating. Sudan’s outages ran about 3.5 hours each, timed to the exam window; Iraq’s lasted around 90 minutes.
Broken cables and broken signatures
On May 5, a routine cryptographic key rollover at DENIC, the registry for Germany’s .de domain, went wrong and started producing invalid DNSSEC signatures. Resolvers that check DNSSEC rejected every .de lookup for several hours, until the registry fixed the problem. Users saw pages fail to load and email bounce, the same symptoms as an outage, even though the network itself was working the entire time.
“From a user’s perspective, the incident was experienced not as a DNS or cryptographic failure but simply as a wave of .de websites and services suddenly becoming unreachable. Though users were still able to access sites that did not use the .de TLD, the experience included pages failing to load, email bouncing, and apps timing out, all of which can mirror the experience of an outage,” Ohlsen added.
In the Caribbean, a fiber cut near Saint Lucia took Karib Cable’s network to close to zero traffic on June 21. Service remained disrupted for nearly a day before recovering. Because Karib Cable is one of the island’s largest providers, the country’s overall traffic fell by about 60% compared with the previous week.
Storms, quakes, and blackouts
Super Typhoon Sinlaku, the strongest storm of the 2026 Pacific typhoon season so far, passed just north of Guam in mid-April. The island avoided a direct hit, but tropical-storm-force winds still took down power and water systems. Traffic from the territory dropped as much as 80% below expected levels on April 13 and 14.
On June 24, two earthquakes struck northern Venezuela within about a minute of each other, near Yumare and San Felipe, followed by an aftershock off the coast near Caracas. The first quake measured magnitude 7.5. Cloudflare Radar recorded a sharp drop in HTTP traffic at the moment of the quakes, visible in Fibex Telecom, state-owned CANTV, and the smaller ISP VNET.
Days later, a power outage in Tanzania on June 27 cut HTTP traffic there for at least five hours. Cloudflare notes that the telemetry looked almost identical to the deliberate, election-related shutdown Tanzania imposed in October 2025, even though this outage had a different cause.
“It is striking how such fundamentally different events leave such similar footprints in the data and user experience. Taken together, these weather-related and power-driven disruptions demonstrate the immense impact the physical world can have on the digital, and the importance of Internet resilience and of building networks with enough redundancy in power, routing, and physical paths to withstand inevitable shocks,” concluded Ohlsen.