29 Jan Cloudflare report reveals scale of global internet disruptions in late 2025

A new report from Cloudflare has revealed the extent of internet disruptions around the world during the final three months of 2025, with cable cuts, extreme weather, power failures and technical faults causing widespread outages.

The company recorded more than 180 internet disruptions across the year. These ranged from short, partial interruptions to complete outages that lasted several days.

While government-ordered shutdowns were rare in the fourth quarter, damage to physical infrastructure proved to be a major cause of disruption.

The report, written by Cloudflare’s Head of Data Insight David Belson, is based on traffic patterns observed across the company’s global network.

One of the few government-directed shutdowns took place in Tanzania during the presidential election. Internet traffic dropped by more than 90 percent as protests broke out, with connectivity disrupted for several days. Although traffic eventually returned, the shutdown had a significant impact on residents, businesses and the diplomatic community.

Cable cuts were a far more frequent problem. In Haiti, Digicel suffered two major outages after international fibre-optic cables were cut, temporarily reducing traffic to almost zero. In Pakistan, damage to the PEACE submarine cable in the Red Sea caused a sharp drop in internet traffic for Cybernet and StormFiber customers, although services recovered more quickly than expected.

Several countries in West and Central Africa were affected after problems on the West Africa Cable System disrupted connectivity in Cameroon. Traffic across major providers became highly unstable, at times dropping by up to 99 per cent.

The issues also reportedly affected neighbouring countries, highlighting how dependent large regions are on a small number of undersea cables.

The Dominican Republic experienced multiple disruptions. One incident was linked to fibre-optic outages affecting a major provider, while a separate nationwide power failure caused internet traffic to fall by almost half. Connectivity only returned to near-normal levels once the electricity supply was largely restored.

Power outages also affected Kenya, where a fault on the regional power network triggered a blackout across several counties. Although electricity was restored within about half an hour, internet connectivity was disrupted for almost four hours.

Extreme weather was another major factor as Hurricane Melissa caused extensive damage in Jamaica, cutting internet traffic by as much as 70 per cent. In Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Cyclone Senyar led to catastrophic flooding and landslides, damaging power and telecommunications infrastructure and causing severe connectivity losses across multiple regions.

Technical faults and system failures also played a significant role. In Indonesia, Smartfren customers experienced an outage that reduced traffic by more than 80 per cent, although the cause was never publicly explained. In the UK, Vodafone suffered a brief but complete outage that affected internet traffic nationwide for around two hours.

Similar problems were seen elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. In Italy, a DNS issue disrupted services for Fastweb customers. In Israel, separate incidents at Cellcom and Partner Communications caused large drops in internet traffic, with evidence suggesting DNS failures may have been involved.

The report also explored problems at major cloud platforms. For example, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare itself all experienced incidents that reduced the availability or performance of websites and applications. In some cases, error rates and connection times increased significantly for several hours.

Cloudflare said the findings show the importance of real-time data and transparency when dealing with internet disruptions, and that timely information allows network operators and the wider technical community to respond more quickly and limit the impact on users.