What took the Internet offline in Q3 2026

Publisher preview

The Internet can feel invisible when everything is working normally. But when connectivity breaks, the many systems it depends upon become evident in an instant. Because Cloudflare’s global network handles more than 20% of the web’s traffic, it offers a unique perspective of how Internet traffic is behaving. When failures in infrastructure, power, policy, or security disrupt access to the Internet, Cloudflare Radar can observe the impact by monitoring traffic to our customers. Each quarter, we review the disruptions detected and annotated on Radar, highlighting what happened, where it happened, and the broader conditions that shaped each event. In this post, we examine the major categories of Internet disruptions observed during the third quarter of 2026, including government-directed shutdowns, power outages and natural disasters. Between July and September, Internet disruptions were largely driven by failures in the systems the Internet depends on. Power grids failed in Cuba, Honduras, Guam, Ukraine, and several other countries. Natural disasters damaged electricity and telecommunications infrastructure from Nepal to Colombia. Government-directed shutdowns remained the most frequent source of disruption, driven largely by exam-related shutdowns in Iraq, while renewed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region showed how quickly connectivity can become part of a broader political and humanitarian crisis. Outages within the United States, Japan, and Portugal — countries with a relatively strong history of Internet resilience — remind us that no country is immune to disruption.

A saved ApplyDjinn digest is not available for this story yet.

This preview is supplied by the publisher. The complete publication remains at its original source.