Cloudflare’s latest Internet Disruption Summary shows that storms, earthquakes, infrastructure damage and government‑ordered blackouts all contributed to widespread internet outages during the second quarter of 2026.
Government‑controlled shutdowns in the Middle East
Iran lifted an 88‑day nationwide internet shutdown on May 26, after beginning the blackout on February 28. Traffic the following day reached roughly 40 % of pre‑shutdown levels. “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. The statement notes that the traffic pattern matches a February window between the recent shutdown and an earlier one in January, indicating that connectivity has reverted to a recent baseline rather than fully normalizing.
In the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, physical damage to data‑center infrastructure has kept traffic to an AWS cloud region in the UAE low since March. AWS reported drone strikes that hit two facilities in the UAE and caused damage near a Bahrain site. “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,” Ohlsen added.
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Iraq ordered three short‑duration blackouts on June 2, 11 and 28, each lasting about 90 minutes, to prevent cheating during exams. Sudan imposed ten outages between April 13 and 23, each lasting roughly 3.5 hours, timed to its exam windows. These measures illustrate how authorities can deliberately curtail internet access for short periods.
Technical glitches and physical cuts
On May 5, a routine cryptographic key rollover at DENIC, the registry for Germany’s .de domain, generated invalid DNSSEC signatures. Resolvers that validate DNSSEC rejected every .de lookup for several hours. Users experienced pages failing to load and email bouncing, even though the underlying network remained functional. “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,” Ohlsen explained.
A fiber cut near Saint Lucia on June 21 reduced traffic on the Karib Cable network to near zero. The outage persisted for almost a day, causing the island’s overall traffic to drop about 60 % compared with the previous week. Similarly, Super Typhoon Sinlaku, the strongest storm of the 2026 Pacific season, passed north of Guam in mid‑April. Although the island avoided a direct hit, tropical‑storm‑force winds knocked out power and water systems, pulling traffic down as much as 80 % below expected levels on April 13 and 14.
Earthquakes, power failures and lingering effects
Two earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, with magnitudes of 7.5 and a subsequent aftershock near Caracas. Cloudflare Radar captured a sharp drop in HTTP traffic for Fibex Telecom, state‑owned CANTV and smaller ISP VNET at the moment of the quakes. A power outage in Tanzania on June 27 cut HTTP traffic for at least five hours, producing telemetry similar to the election‑related shutdown imposed in October 2025, despite the different cause.
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These events, though varied in origin, leave comparable footprints in traffic data. The pattern suggests that physical disruptions—whether natural or man‑made—can quickly translate into digital outages, highlighting the need for resilient network design.
Looking ahead, the convergence of geopolitical decisions and environmental hazards means that internet reliability will continue to hinge on both policy choices and infrastructure robustness. While redundancy can mitigate some risks, the sheer scale of recent disruptions hints that complete immunity may be unrealistic, prompting operators to prioritize adaptable routing and backup power solutions.
Operators must stay agile.
