Shutdowns, outages, and conflict: reviewing Q1 2026's Internet disruptions with Cloudflare Radar!

Hey everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today's news is a bit sobering. I just read a big roundup of all the ways the Internet blinked out around the world during the first quarter of 2026, and I want to walk you through it.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog published its quarterly report on Internet disruptions from January to March 2026 (Q1), built on observations from Cloudflare Radar. The report says Q1 saw more severe and prolonged outages than usual, and it sorts everything neatly by cause:

• Government-directed shutdowns (often around elections)
• Power outages and grid failures
• Military action and conflict
• Severe weather
• Submarine cable damage
• Technical faults and unexplained outages

Why it matters

The Internet is now a utility, like electricity or water. When it goes down, people lose access to election information, money transfers, and even emergency contact with family.

Because Cloudflare runs a network across the whole world, it can observe from the outside when and where a country's traffic drops. Even when the parties involved stay silent, the data remains on the record. That is what makes this kind of work matter for transparency and accountability.

What happened?

There were a lot of concrete cases. Here are a few:

• Uganda: right before the January 15 presidential election, the country cut the Internet nationwide at 18:00 on January 13. Traffic at the Uganda Internet Exchange Point fell from about 72 Gbps to 1 Gbps, and full restoration did not come until January 26.
• Iran: two shutdowns, in January and late February. The second, triggered by escalating military strikes, pushed traffic below 1% of normal, and the country was still effectively offline at the end of April.
• Republic of Congo: roughly 60 hours of blackout on the March 15 election day.
• Ukraine: Russian strikes on energy infrastructure dropped traffic in Dnipro and Kharkiv by around 50%.
• Power was a big theme too. Paraguay lost as much as 72% after transmission-line trouble, and Cuba's national grid collapsed three separate times in March alone.
• On the weather side, Storm Kristin made landfall in Portugal and cut traffic in the Leiria district by as much as 70%.

Dive Deep

What I love about this report is that it digs into how the shutdowns were carried out.

Iran's first shutdown used filtering rather than withdrawing routes, and Radar caught huge amounts of IPv6 address space disappearing hours before traffic fell (Asiatech accounted for about 9.4% of the country's total IPv6 loss, and RASANA about 8.8%). The second shutdown reportedly relied on "whitelists" and "white SIM cards" so that only selected users could reach approved sites.

The part that made me gasp was a cloud provider's data centers being physically targeted. In March, AWS facilities in the UAE (me-central-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1) were damaged by drone strikes. Cloudflare tracked elevated connection failure rates in Cloud Observatory, and AWS itself acknowledged:

These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.

You can follow disruptions like these yourself in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center. Lined up against past quarterly summaries (like Q3 2025), recurring patterns start to show, such as Cuba's fragile power grid.

Wrap-up

• The Cloudflare Blog published a quarterly report cataloging Q1 2026 Internet disruptions by cause.
• Causes ranged widely: government shutdowns, power outages, military action, weather, cable cuts, and technical faults. Iran was still effectively offline at the end of April.
• Standout cases included Cuba's grid collapsing three times in a month and AWS data centers taking physical damage from drone strikes.
• It goes deep on mechanisms too, with Radar observing Iran's filtering and vanishing IPv6 space.

If you care about infrastructure and network reliability, or you want to grasp how fragile the world's Internet can be, this one is for you!