Cloudflare Reports Q2 Global Internet Outages Caused by Natural Disasters and Government Interventions

According to Cloudflare's Q2 2026 report released on July 28, natural disasters, government interventions, and infrastructure failures were the primary causes of global internet disruptions during the second quarter. Typhoon Sinlaku caused widespread power outages on Guam in mid-April, reducing local internet traffic by 80% below expected levels. Iran, following 88 days of nationwide internet shutdown, began restoring connectivity on May 26, with HTTP traffic initially recovering to 90% of pre-blackout levels before stabilizing at approximately 59%. On May 5, Germany's .de domain registry DENIC generated incorrect DNSSEC signatures during key rotation, causing global validation resolvers to reject related requests and temporarily rendering many .de websites inaccessible. Saint Lucia experienced a 60% traffic decline on June 21 following fiber cuts.

Other significant disruptions included a 7.5-magnitude earthquake in Venezuela, widespread power outages in Tanzania, and deliberate internet shutdowns by Iraqi and Sudanese governments during exam periods. Additionally, drone strikes in the Middle East conflict caused physical damage to AWS's me-central-1 data center in the UAE, continuing to impact regional cloud services.