Typhoons, quakes, blackouts, shutdowns — how the world's Internet shook in Q2 2026

Hi, I'm Shiichan, thanks for stopping by! Today I want to share a roundup report I found on the Cloudflare Blog about Internet disruptions around the world!

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog published a summary of Internet disruptions observed around the world during Q2 2026 (April through June), based on traffic data from Cloudflare Radar. It covers disruptions from a wide range of causes — natural disasters, government-mandated shutdowns, and infrastructure failures. The post notes that this is "a summary of notable, confirmed disruptions rather than an exhaustive list" — a fuller view of detected anomalies is available in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center.

Why it matters

Like most infrastructure, it's easy to overlook the Internet's complexity as long as it's working. The moment it fails, though, that complexity comes into full view.

Cloudflare sits in a unique position to observe global traffic, which makes it one of the few organizations able to detect and document these disruptions. This report shows how wildly different causes — from natural disasters to government policy decisions to a simple misconfiguration — can all lead to the same outcome: people losing connectivity.

What you'll learn from this report

The Q2 2026 disruptions are grouped into three broad categories.

• Natural disasters and power issues (Guam, Venezuela, Tanzania, and more)
• Government decisions and geopolitics (Iran, the UAE, Iraq, Sudan, and more)
• Underlying infrastructure vulnerabilities (Germany, Saint Lucia)

It walks through where, why, and for how long connectivity was lost, with concrete numbers attached — a good read if you want to understand the kinds of risks that come with running services for an international audience.

Dive Deep

Natural disasters and power outages

• Guam: In mid-April, Super Typhoon Sinlaku, the strongest storm of the 2026 Pacific typhoon season so far, passed just north of Guam. The island avoided a direct hit, but tropical-storm-force winds still knocked out power, and traffic fell as much as 80% below expected levels on April 13-14
• Venezuela: On June 24, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Yumare and San Felipe in northern Venezuela at around 22:04 UTC, followed by an aftershock about a minute later. A sharp drop in HTTP traffic was visible at major ISP Fibex Telecom (an estimated 1.6 million users), state-owned CANTV, and regional ISP VNET
• Tanzania: A power outage on June 27 caused a sharp drop in HTTP traffic that lasted at least five hours. Despite having a completely different cause from the deliberate, election-related shutdown in October 2025, the telemetry and the impact on residents looked nearly identical

Governments and geopolitics

• Iran: The 88-day shutdown that began on February 28 started being lifted around May 26. Traffic reached 40% of pre-outage levels by May 27, climbed as high as 90% at one point, and has since settled at roughly 59% of the pre-shutdown baseline
• UAE: HTTP traffic to AWS's me-central-1 region in the Middle East has stayed low. AWS itself reported on April 30 that the region "has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East," following an earlier March 3 report that facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were physically struck by drone strikes
• Iraq: Three government-mandated shutdowns (on June 2, 11, and 28), each lasting about 90 minutes, aimed at preventing cheating during national exams
• Sudan: Ten shutdowns between April 13 and 23, for the same exam-related reason, each lasting about 3.5 hours from 11:45 to 15:15 UTC, timed to the exam window

Infrastructure vulnerabilities

• Germany: On May 5, a DNSSEC key rollover at DENIC, the registry for the .de domain, started producing invalid signatures. Validating resolvers worldwide began rejecting every .de lookup with SERVFAIL errors until service was restored at 23:15 UTC on May 5 (01:15 local time on May 6). Interestingly, query volume for .de actually went up during the incident, since failed answers can't be cached and had to be retried repeatedly
• Saint Lucia: On June 21, HTTP request traffic from Karib Cable's network fell to nearly zero, reportedly due to a fiber cut near the island. It stayed flat for close to a full day before recovering around 17:00 UTC on June 22. Since Karib Cable is one of the country's largest providers, Saint Lucia's overall traffic dropped by about 60% compared to the prior week

Wrap-up

• Q2 2026 disruptions fall into three categories: natural disasters, government-mandated shutdowns, and infrastructure vulnerabilities
• Whether it's a typhoon in Guam, an earthquake in Venezuela, or a blackout in Tanzania, the causes differ but the outcome is the same: lost connectivity
• Iran is recovering from its 88-day shutdown, but traffic still hasn't fully returned to its pre-shutdown baseline
• Germany's DNSSEC key rollover incident is a reminder that a single misconfiguration can take an entire country's domain offline
• A good read if you're an infrastructure or SRE person thinking about availability and risk for services with an international audience.