What took the Internet offline in Q3 2026

What it is

Cloudflare Radar's review of 49 Internet disruptions between July and September 2026. The summary has the category counts and headline figures. This adds the schedules, failure mechanisms and recovery statistics that matter for planning around outages.

Failure patterns the page documents

Shared exchange points. On 10 September 2026 a power failure at one Honduran interconnection facility hit at least 11 major providers for about three hours. Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala (AS14754) and Celtel (AS52262) were unaffected. Cloudflare suggests their Honduran connectivity relies more on infrastructure outside the country.

Data center cooling. On 13 August 2026 a cooling failure at a Phoenix data center caused a near-total traffic drop from Namecheap (AS22612). Cloudflare flags cooling as an increasingly important dependency.

Repeated grid failure in Cuba. Four power-related outages occurred on 6 July, 14 July, 3 August and 18 to 20 September. Traffic drops ranged from 18% (14 July) to 59% (3 August).

Conflict and energy. Sevastopol, Ukraine, lost power on 5 July for eight hours, with HTTP traffic down 98%. Drone strikes on energy infrastructure on 12 August caused a ten-hour disruption with traffic down up to 95%.

Storms and quakes. Guam took four days to recover traffic after the earlier Super Typhoon Sinlaku. Super Typhoon Bavi then left only about 25% of distribution feeders online at one point, per the Guam Power Authority, despite an early state of emergency. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia in August caused a four-and-a-half-day disruption on Colombia Telecomunicaciones (AS3816), attributed to fiber damage. In Nepal, flash floods on 26 August caused a two-hour outage with HTTP traffic down up to 18%.

Shutdown specifics

Iraq's 18 exam shutdowns ran on a fixed schedule at 03:30 to 04:00 UTC, each lasting about 15 to 90 minutes. Three fell between 1 and 8 July, and most fell between 26 August and 28 September. Iraq's Minister of Communication, Mustafa Sanad, said a digital exam distribution system would remove the need for shutdowns, as quoted by Internet Society Pulse.

Ethiopia's Tigray region had a 10-day government-directed shutdown with traffic down 100% locally and up to 30% at country level.

Syria and Sudan recorded no exam shutdowns this quarter. Cloudflare attributes that to exam calendars, not a policy change.

Recovery statistics

Of the 49 disruptions, 14 recovered in under an hour and 16 in under three hours. Radar counted 14 power outages across 10 countries.

Caveats

Radar observes only traffic to Cloudflare customers. On the Russian Far East fiber cuts of 19 September 2026, during elections, Cloudflare says the data cannot show whether they were election-related. Rostelecom called the damage deliberate. The page gives no mitigation guidance, only observations.