Cloudflare summarizes 2026 Q2 global internet outage incidents, with natural disasters and government intervention as the main causes

PANews July 28, Cloudflare released a retrospective on global internet outages in the second quarter of 2026. Natural disasters, government intervention, and infrastructure failures were the main triggers. In mid-April, the super typhoon Sinlaku caused widespread power outages in Guam and hit network infrastructure, with local internet traffic dropping as much as 80% compared with expectations at one point. After Iran experienced a nationwide internet shutdown for 88 days, it began restoring connectivity on May 26. HTTP traffic temporarily rebounded to 90% of pre-shutdown levels, then stabilized at about 59%. On May 5, the German .de domain registrar DENIC generated an incorrect signature during a DNSSEC key rotation, causing global validating resolvers to reject related requests and leaving many .de websites briefly inaccessible.

On June 21, Saint Lucia saw its national traffic drop by about 60% from the previous week due to fiber optic cuts. Around the same time, Venezuela experienced a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, Tanzania suffered widespread power outages, and the governments of Iraq and Sudan respectively implemented 3 and 10 internet shutdowns during the exam period. In addition, the physical damage to the AWS UAE me-central-1 region data center caused by drone attacks stemming from conflicts in the Middle East continues to affect local cloud services.