Bad updates, broken cables and blackouts - Cloudflare reveals some of the wildest reasons behind Internet downtime across the world
Cloudflare tells us some of the oddest reasons behind Internet outages
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/rahim-amir · TechRadarNews By Rahim Amir Published 1 August 2026
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- Cloudflare summary logs a typhoon, two earthquakes, power failures, and thirteen government exam shutdowns
- It also identified a fiber cut, drone damage to an AWS region, and a botched DNSSEC key rollover
- The report's sharpest finding is that Tanzania's accidental power blackout looked almost identical in the data to its deliberate election-day shutdown in 2025
Cloudflare has published its latest account of what recently knocked chunks of the Internet offline, and the list reads like a catalogue of everything that can go wrong at once: a typhoon, two earthquakes a minute apart, a national power failure, ten government shutdowns timed to school exams, a fiber cut, drone damage to a cloud region, and a routine cryptographic key update that briefly made every .de website in the world unreachable.
Drawn from traffic telemetry on Cloudflare Radar, it is a useful reminder that the systems most people treat as a utility are held together by a surprisingly small number of things.
With geopolitics in the Middle East shaping traffic in Iran, the UAE, Iraq and Sudan, Cloudflare found that not only did the former's traffic drop even after a shutdown ended two months ago, but the UAE seems to be one of the most affected by the on-again, off-again US-Iran conflict thanks to two AWS facilities being struck by Iranian drones.
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An accidental blackout and a government shutdown look similar from the outside
Cloudflare's insights tend to make for an interesting read on how the connected world functions, often defying expectations about traffic, online activity, and user behavior, with the recent FIFA 2026 World Cup being an excellent place to start.
When it comes to the most severe disruptions, one would turn to Iran's approach, which cut off internet access during its conflict with the US, an engagement that also had ramifications for most of its Gulf neighbors.
Interestingly, Radar began picking up signs of restoration on May 26 2026, ending an 88-day shutdown that had left the country almost entirely offline since February 28, but it never reached peak pre-conflict levels.
By May 27, traffic had returned to 40% of pre-outage levels, consistent with reports that access was being reintroduced selectively. It has since climbed as high as 90% before settling at roughly 59% of pre-shutdown levels, suggesting that more stringent restrictions may be in effect even as the country grapples with a war that threatens to reignite at a moment's notice.
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