Cloudflare summarizes Q2 2026 global internet outage events, natural disasters and government intervention are the main causes

Cloudflare released its Q2 2026 Global Internet Outage Review, identifying natural disasters, government intervention, and infrastructure failures as primary causes. In mid-April, Super Typhoon Sinlaku caused widespread power outages in Guam and impacted network infrastructure, leading to a temporary 80% drop in local internet traffic compared to expectations. Iran began restoring connectivity on May 26 after 88 days of nationwide internet shutdown, with HTTP traffic briefly recovering to 90% of pre-shutdown levels before stabilizing around 59%. On May 5, Germany's .de domain registry, DENIC, generated incorrect signatures during a DNSSEC key rotation, causing global validation resolvers to reject related requests and temporarily making a large number of .de websites inaccessible. On June 21, fiber optic cable cuts in Saint Lucia led to an approximate 60% decrease in nationwide traffic compared to the previous week. During the same period, Venezuela experienced a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, Tanzania suffered widespread power outages, and the governments of Iraq and Sudan implemented 3 and 10 internet shutdowns, respectively, during examination periods. Additionally, physical damage to AWS's UAE me-central-1 region data center caused by drone strikes related to Middle Eastern conflicts continued to affect local cloud service operations.