Internet service broke down 49 times around the world from July through September, most often because a government ordered it shut off or the power grid failed, Cloudflare said on Tuesday in its quarterly report on disruptions.
Government-directed shutdowns accounted for 19 of the incidents recorded on the company’s Radar monitoring platform, including 18 tied to school exams in Iraq. Power outages caused 14 incidents across 10 countries, and natural disasters caused five.
Iraq’s shutdowns ran to a schedule. They began between 3:30 and 4 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time and lasted 15 to 90 minutes, most falling between Aug. 26 and Sept. 28, with three more in early July. In a video message cited by Internet Society Pulse, Mustafa Sanad, Iraq’s communications minister, confirmed the shutdowns and “vowed to develop a digital system” that would end the practice of cutting access on exam days.
Cuba’s outages followed an unstable grid: four of them in the quarter, on July 6, July 14 and Aug. 3, then a three-day blackout from Sept. 18 to 20, with traffic falling between 18 percent and 59 percent each time. In Honduras, a single failure on Sept. 10 at a facility where providers interconnect hit at least 11 major carriers and cut national traffic 63 percent for about three hours.
In Ukraine, a July 5 power failure in Sevastopol produced an eight-hour blackout and a 98 percent traffic drop; a month later, on Aug. 12, drone strikes on energy infrastructure cut connectivity for 10 hours and traffic by as much as 95 percent. Even countries with strong track records were not spared. A cooling-system failure at a data center in Phoenix on Aug. 13 nearly erased traffic from the web company Namecheap.
Storms and earthquakes did the rest. Super Typhoon Bavi hit Guam less than three months after Super Typhoon Sinlaku, and the Guam Power Authority said winds brought down transmission lines, leaving only about 25 percent of distribution feeders online at one point. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia in August damaged fiber lines and kept Colombia Telecomunicaciones traffic depressed for four and a half days. A 7.1 quake near Kumamoto, Japan, brought evacuation orders for roughly 150,000 people, and flash floods in Nepal on Aug. 26 knocked out power across three districts, cutting regional traffic up to 18 percent for two hours.
The sharpest political blackout came in Ethiopia, where renewed fighting in the Tigray region was accompanied by a 10-day government shutdown that erased local traffic entirely and pulled national traffic down as much as 30 percent. The outage recalled the civil war of 2020 to 2022, when Tigray was cut off from telecommunications, power, banking and aid in what the World Health Organization called a “de facto blockade,” according to France24.
Syria and Sudan, which have also shut down their networks during exams in recent years, recorded no such disruptions this quarter — a difference Cloudflare attributed to exam calendars rather than any clear change in policy. The company said it would keep watching both countries when their next national exam periods arrive.