The Internet can feel invisible when everything is working normally. But when connectivity breaks, the many systems it depends upon become evident in an instant. Because Cloudflare’s global network handles more than 20% of the web’s traffic, it offers a unique perspective of how Internet traffic is behaving.
When failures in infrastructure, power, policy, or security disrupt access to the Internet, Cloudflare Radar can observe the impact by monitoring traffic to our customers. Each quarter, we review the disruptions detected and annotated on Radar, highlighting what happened, where it happened, and the broader conditions that shaped each event. In this post, we examine the major categories of Internet disruptions observed during the third quarter of 2026, including government-directed shutdowns, power outages and natural disasters.
Disruptions at a glance Between July and September, Internet disruptions were largely driven by failures in the systems the Internet depends on. Power grids failed in Cuba, Honduras, Guam, Ukraine, and several other countries. Natural disasters damaged electricity and telecommunications infrastructure from Nepal to Colombia.
Government-directed shutdowns remained the most frequent source of disruption, driven largely by exam-related shutdowns in Iraq, while renewed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region showed how quickly connectivity can become part of a broader political and humanitarian crisis. Outages within the United States, Japan, and Portugal — countries with a relatively strong history of Internet resilience — remind us that no country is immune to disruption.
In total, Cloudflare Radar recorded 49 disruptions during the quarter. Government-directed shutdowns accounted for 19 incidents, including 18 exam shutdowns in Iraq. Power outages followed with 14 incidents, while natural disasters accounted for five.
Power failure was a leading cause of disruptions The Internet is designed to be distributed and resilient, but that resilience still depends on electricity. When power fails, routers, mobile base stations, data centers, interconnection facilities, and the networks that connect them can fail with it. Over the past three months, that dependency was one of the clearest patterns in Radar’s disruption data.
Power outages were the second-most common cause of disruptions by incident count this quarter, behind government-directed exam shutdowns. In Cuba, Internet disruptions followed the erratic patterns of an unstable power grid. Radar observed four power-related outages across the quarter, meaning connectivity was affected by grid failures at least once a month.
The outages took place July 6, July 14, August 3, and a three-day blackout from September 18 to 20. The traffic volume decreases ranged from 18% on July 14 to 59% on August 3. Honduras illustrated how a localized infrastructure failure can produce national-level effects.
A power failure on September 10 at an interconnection facility affected at least 11 major providers, showing how concentrated traffic exchange points can become single points of failure. The outage lasted approximately three hours, during which HTTP traffic across the country fell by 63%. Two notable exceptions were the cross-border provider Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala (AS14754) and mobile carrier Celtel (AS52262), which were unaffected.
This suggests that their Honduran connectivity may rely more heavily on infrastructure outside the country. Cloudflare Radar - Traffic volume by autonomous system On July 5, a power outage in Sevastopol, Ukraine, caused an eight-hour blackout, with HTTP traffic dropping by 98%. A little over a month later, on August 12, drone strikes targeting energy infrastructure caused another power outage, resulting in a ten-hour Internet disruption and up to a 95% decline in traffic volume.
As discussed in more detail below, geopolitical conflict remains a major driver of Internet disruptions. These incidents also show how conflict, energy infrastructure, and Internet connectivity are fundamentally intertwined. Cloudflare Radar - HTTP traffic Cloudflare Radar - HTTP traffic Also of note: on August 13, a cooling system failure at a data center in the U.
S. city of Phoenix caused a near-total drop in Internet traffic from Namecheap (AS22612) . Outages such as these will be important to watch as the role of cooling systems becomes increasingly critical.
Beyond the larger outages in Cuba, Honduras, and Ukraine, power-related disruptions also appeared across a wide range of countries, including Eswatini, Botswana, Tajikistan, Kenya, Saint Lucia, Georgia, and Gabon. Some of these events were caused by sudden failures, while others, such as planned load-shedding in Eswatini, reflected deliberate efforts to manage constrained power supply.
Their scale and duration varied, but together they point to the same underlying dependency: when power systems become unstable, Internet connectivity often becomes unstable with them. In total, Radar observed 14 power-related disruptions across 10 countries during the quarter. The physical world takes the virtual world offline Last quarter, Radar reported on the impact of Super Typhoon Sinlaku, as it moved through the Mariana Islands, knocking out power and, in turn, Internet connectivity in Guam, where HTTP traffic took four days to return to typical levels .
Super Typhoon Bavi followed Sinlaku by less than three months, giving Guam two major storm-related connectivity disruptions in a single year. Officials appeared to take earlier preparedness steps ahead of Bavi, including declaring a state of emergency before peak storm conditions. Even so, the storm caused widespread power outages.
The Guam Power Authority reported that strong winds brought down key transmission lines, leaving only about 25% of distribution feeders online at one point.
Originally published at blog.cloudflare.com
