To the average user, the Internet often feels entirely invisible when functioning normally—a seamless, ambient utility taken for granted day in and day out. However, when connectivity abruptly breaks, the vast, complex matrix of physical and systemic infrastructure that underpins the modern web becomes evident in an instant. Because Cloudflare’s expansive global network handles more than 20 percent of all web traffic worldwide, it occupies a unique vantage point to observe global Internet health and behavioral patterns in real time.
When infrastructure failures, power grid collapses, geopolitical policies, or security incidents disrupt public access to the web, Cloudflare Radar can comprehensively observe and measure the impact by continuously monitoring traffic metrics to its millions of customers. Every quarter, the platform reviews the various disruptions it has detected and annotated, highlighting precisely what happened, the geographic locations affected, and the broader environmental, political, or economic conditions that shaped each event.
In its latest quarterly review, Cloudflare examines the major categories of Internet disruptions observed across the globe during the third quarter of 2026. The data paints a vivid picture of a deeply interconnected digital world regularly held hostage by the vulnerabilities of the physical world, highlighting incidents ranging from recurring government-directed exam shutdowns to catastrophic power grid failures and destructive natural disasters.
Internet Disruptions at a Glance
Between the months of July and September, global Internet stability was largely undermined by failures in the foundational systems upon which the digital age depends. Severe power grid failures crippled connectivity in nations such as Cuba, Honduras, Guam, Ukraine, and several other regions. Meanwhile, powerful natural disasters severely damaged vital electricity and telecommunications infrastructure across vast geographies stretching from Nepal to Colombia.
Despite the physical toll of natural calamities and power outages, government-directed shutdowns remained the single most frequent source of digital blackouts during the quarter. This trend was driven predominantly by scheduled, exam-related blockades enforced across Iraq. At the same time, a flare-up of renewed armed conflict in Ethiopia’s volatile Tigray region vividly demonstrated how quickly civilian connectivity can be weaponized or collateralized as part of a broader political and humanitarian crisis.
Perhaps most notably, unexpected infrastructure outages within the United States, Japan, and Portugal—countries boasting a historically strong track record of robust Internet resilience—served as a sobering reminder that no nation, regardless of technological advancement, is entirely immune to sudden digital disruption.
In total, Cloudflare Radar recorded 49 distinct major disruptions throughout the quarter. Government-directed shutdowns accounted for 19 of these incidents, with 18 of them tied directly to national academic examinations in Iraq. Power infrastructure failures followed closely behind as the second most common catalyst, accounting for 14 incidents, while natural disasters were responsible for five recorded events, with the remainder stemming from diverse technical and security anomalies.
Power Failure Emerges as a Leading Cause of Global Outages
Although the Internet was architected from its inception to be a highly distributed and resilient communications medium, that fundamental resilience still fundamentally relies on a steady and reliable supply of electricity. When local or national power grids fail, essential network hardware—including routers, mobile cellular base stations, massive data centers, interconnection facilities, and the high-capacity transport networks that bind them together—inevitably fail right alongside the grid.
Over the three-month observation period, this stark dependency emerged as one of the most prominent patterns in Cloudflare Radar’s disruption telemetry. Power outages ranked as the second-most common cause of Internet disruptions by overall incident count, sitting just behind government-ordered exam shutdowns.
In Cuba, widespread Internet disruptions closely mirrored the erratic and fragile patterns of an increasingly unstable national electrical grid. Radar detected four separate power-related outages over the course of the quarter, indicating that national connectivity was severely impacted by grid collapses at least once a month. These specific outages occurred on July 6, July 14, August 3, and culminated in a prolonged, multi-day blackout that lasted from September 18 to September 20. The severity of the resulting traffic volume drops varied considerably, ranging from an 18 percent decline on July 14 to a staggering 59 percent plummet on August 3.
Honduras provided a striking textbook example of how a localized failure in critical infrastructure can cascade into severe, national-level consequences. A major power failure on September 10 at a key domestic interconnection facility directly affected at least 11 major telecommunications providers. This incident underscored the inherent dangers of concentrated traffic exchange points, which can easily transform into catastrophic single points of failure. The blackout lasted approximately three hours, during which aggregate HTTP traffic volumes across the entire country fell by an extraordinary 63 percent.
Interestingly, two notable exceptions during the Honduran outage were the cross-border provider Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala and mobile carrier Celtel, both of which remained completely unaffected. This divergence strongly suggests that their domestic connectivity relies more heavily on resilient network infrastructure situated outside of Honduras’s borders.
The intertwining of geopolitical conflict and electrical infrastructure was similarly visible in Ukraine. On July 5, a sudden power outage in Sevastopol triggered an eight-hour blackout, causing local HTTP traffic to plummet by 98 percent. A little over a month later, on August 12, targeted drone strikes directed at regional energy infrastructure knocked out power once again. This second attack resulted in a ten-hour Internet disruption and caused up to a 95 percent drop in regional traffic volume, illustrating how modern warfare routinely targets the physical intersections of energy grids and digital communications.
Physical infrastructure vulnerabilities also struck data center environments in stable Western nations. On August 13, a catastrophic cooling system failure at a major data center located in Phoenix, Arizona, triggered a near-total collapse in Internet traffic originating from hosting provider Namecheap. Incidents of this nature are drawing increased scrutiny from network engineers as the thermal management of high-density data centers becomes increasingly critical to uninterrupted web operations.
Beyond these prominent events, power-related disruptions were detected across a remarkably wide range of developing and developed nations alike, including Eswatini, Botswana, Tajikistan, Kenya, Saint Lucia, Georgia, and Gabon. While some of these incidents were sparked by sudden, unexpected equipment failures, others—such as planned rolling blackouts and load-shedding initiatives in Eswatini—reflected deliberate economic and logistical efforts by authorities to manage severely constrained power supplies.
Though their individual scales and durations varied wildly, they all pointed to the exact same underlying vulnerability: when electrical power systems become unstable, Internet connectivity inevitably follows suit. In total, Radar recorded 14 distinct power-related disruptions spanning 10 different countries throughout the quarter.
The Physical World Takes the Virtual World Offline
Environmental and natural disasters frequently demonstrated their capacity to yank the virtual world offline by devastating physical telecommunications and power assets. These events echo previous quarters, such as when Super Typhoon Sinlaku tore through the Mariana Islands, knocking out power and subsequent Internet connectivity in Guam, where HTTP traffic required four days to recover to normal baseline levels.
Less than three months after Sinlaku, Super Typhoon Bavi struck Guam, dealing the island territory its second major storm-related connectivity crisis within a single year. Local officials appeared to implement proactive preparedness measures ahead of Bavi’s landfall, including declaring a formal state of emergency before peak meteorological conditions battered the region. Even so, the ferocious storm inflicted widespread and severe power grid failures. The Guam Power Authority reported that hurricane-force winds ripped down vital high-voltage transmission lines, leaving only about 25 percent of local distribution feeders online at the height of the storm. From a digital perspective, the outcome was thoroughly familiar: widespread blackouts, severed physical lines, and a grueling multi-day recovery period for regional Internet traffic.
In Japan, a powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the southern region, prompting immediate emergency evacuation orders affecting approximately 150,000 residents in Kumamoto. The resulting impact on Internet connectivity manifested primarily in a noticeable drop in desktop computer traffic, while mobile network usage remained largely resilient and uninterrupted.
Further south in Colombia, a massive 7.4 magnitude earthquake in August triggered widespread building collapses, personal injuries, mass civic evacuations, and a debilitating four-and-a-half-day Internet disruption. Severe physical damage inflicted on underground and overhead fiber-optic network infrastructure, compounded by the chaotic aftermath of the seismic event, drove a profound drop in traffic from Colombia Telecomunicaciones.
Meanwhile, in Nepal, sudden and violent flash floods roared through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems on August 26, wreaking havoc on communities across the Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading districts. The raging floodwaters severely damaged residential homes, public infrastructure, and essential municipal services, including regional electrical grids, which in turn severed local Internet connectivity. The resulting outage captured by Cloudflare Radar lasted for two hours, during which regional HTTP traffic plunged by up to 18 percent.
Exam Shutdowns Persist in Iraq
Government-directed administrative shutdowns remained the single largest driver of discrete Internet disruptions during the third quarter, with the vast majority taking place in Iraq via recurring, highly scheduled blackouts implemented throughout the reporting period.
These state-ordered disruptions followed a rigid, predictable daily schedule occurring strictly between 03:30 and 04:00 UTC, with individual blackouts lasting anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. The bulk of these disruptions were concentrated between August 26 and September 28, following an initial trio of shutdowns executed between July 1 and July 8.
According to data and reporting compiled by Internet Society Pulse, Iraqi Minister of Communication Mustafa Sanad addressed the controversial practice in a public video message. Minister Sanad formally confirmed the state-directed shutdowns and vowed that the government would actively develop an updated digital distribution system designed to eliminate the need for centralized exam paper distribution and, by logical extension, eradicate the need to deliberately cut off national Internet access on examination days. Cloudflare Radar has indicated it will continue monitoring Iraq’s domestic networks closely as development on the promised system progresses.
Notably, neighboring Syria and Sudan—two nations that have historically relied heavily on recurring, exam-related Internet blackouts in past academic years—did not record similar state-ordered disruptions during this particular quarter. However, analysts note that this absence likely stems from regional variations in academic exam calendars rather than a definitive, long-term shift in government censorship policy. Radar will maintain surveillance to determine whether future national examination periods bring a resurgence of shutdowns in either country.
Disruptions Coincide with Volatile Political Events
Geopolitical tensions and domestic political milestones also frequently manifested as significant digital blackouts. In Ethiopia, a sudden flare-up of renewed armed conflict in the restive Tigray region was accompanied by a severe, government-directed Internet shutdown that lasted for 10 consecutive days. During this period, regional traffic plummeted by a total of 100 percent, signaling a total, unyielding digital blockade.
This severe disruption immediately evoked memories of the extensive telecommunications blackout imposed during Ethiopia’s brutal civil war from 2020 to 2022. During that prolonged conflict, Tigray was almost entirely cut off from outside communications, electrical power grids, commercial banking services, fuel supplies, and vital humanitarian aid—a situation that the World Health Organization formally characterized as a "de facto blockade." Although this latest outage appeared to remain geographically localized to Tigray, its massive scale was clearly visible in national-level metrics, causing aggregate country-wide HTTP traffic to fall by up to 30 percent.
In another politically sensitive incident on September 19, coinciding directly with nationwide elections in Russia, severe physical damage to critical backbone fiber-optic cables in the country’s Far East triggered regional connectivity outages. The affected areas included Chukotka, Magadan Oblast, Kamchatka Krai, and Sakhalin Oblast. Major Russian telecom operator Rostelecom publicly described the incidents as deliberate acts of physical vandalism and damage directed against core fiber-optic lines, noting that network engineers managed to restore baseline connectivity by successfully routing traffic through alternative backup channels. While Cloudflare Radar telemetry alone cannot definitively establish whether the physical cable damage was directly orchestrated to interfere with the elections, the timing remains exceptionally notable.
A Quarter Shaped by Fragility and Resilience
Across the third quarter of 2026, state-directed administrative shutdowns emerged as the most frequent source of global disruption, powered largely by Iraq’s stubborn reliance on exam-related blackouts. Power grid failures followed closely behind, degrading network reliability across Cuba, Honduras, Ukraine, Eswatini, Botswana, Tajikistan, Kenya, Saint Lucia, Georgia, and Gabon. Natural disasters and localized armed conflicts introduced yet another layer of systemic vulnerability, forcefully reminding the global community that the true resilience of the Internet depends upon far more than just sophisticated routers and subterranean fiber cables. It relies heavily on reliable electricity, physical infrastructure protection, sound government policy decisions, and the inherent capability of modern networks to dynamically route around failure.
Cloudflare Radar also documented numerous noteworthy outages isolated to individual autonomous networks and service providers. These included disruptions affecting One Communications in Guyana following a reported physical cable cut, MEO in Portugal following a high-profile mass cyberattack, Digicel Haiti, TurkNet in Turkey, and Fanap Telecom in Iran.
Each of these diverse incidents vividly demonstrates both the underlying fragility of the global Internet and, conversely, its remarkable capacity for self-healing and technical resilience. Many of these recorded disruptions were mercifully brief: 14 separate incidents saw regional traffic return to typical baseline levels in under an hour, while 16 others fully recovered in less than three hours.
Nevertheless, even short-lived outages can carry severe, real-world consequences for the civilian populations caught in the crossfire, particularly when they coincide with violent storms, destructive earthquakes, armed conflicts, or intense political unrest. In the modern era, unhindered access to the Internet is frequently synonymous with access to critical information, emergency coordination, personal safety, and humanitarian aid.
Cloudflare Radar will continue to monitor Internet disruptions across the globe and share transparent insights drawn from the daily operations of Cloudflare’s expansive global network.
