Cloudflare has released a summary of global Internet disruptions observed during the fourth quarter of 2025, highlighting continued instability driven by infrastructure damage, extreme weather, conflict, and technical failures.
Over the course of 2025, Cloudflare tracked more than 180 Internet disruptions worldwide, ranging from brief, localized incidents to complete outages lasting several days. In the final quarter of the year, the company recorded only one government-directed Internet shutdown, while other disruptions were linked to cable damage, power outages, weather events, and conflict-related infrastructure strikes.
Cloudflare noted that its findings are based on significant deviations from expected traffic patterns across its global network and represent confirmed incidents rather than a comprehensive list of all outages.
Key takeaways from Q4 2025:
- Government-directed shutdowns dropped sharply: Tanzania was the only country that imposed an Internet shutdown in Q4, temporarily cutting access on October 29th as violent protests took place during the country’s presidential election.
- Fiber optic cable cuts and damage to submarine cables cause major disruptions: Countries including Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon, and the Dominican Republic were impacted by cable cuts.
- Cyclones and Hurricanes impact connectivity: Cyclone Senyar caused catastrophic floods and landslides that damaged power infrastructure in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, causing major disruptions to Internet connectivity. Hurricane Melissa also left infrastructure damage in Jamaica on October 28, causing Internet traffic to drop 70% lower than the previous week.
- Russian strikes bring down connectivity for Ukraine: A Russian drone strike on December 12 damaged energy infrastructure, causing power outages in parts of the region and causing traffic to drop as much as 57% compared to the previous week.
The full Cloudflare report on Internet disruptions in Q4 2025 is available here.
(AI was used in part to facilitate this article.)
