Cloudflare reports Q1 2026 internet disruptions from shutdowns and conflict outages
Updated
Updated · Tahawul Tech · May 4
Cloudflare reports Q1 2026 internet disruptions from shutdowns and conflict outages
9 articles · Updated · Tahawul Tech · May 4
In the Middle East and Africa, Iran's internet traffic fell near zero from 8-21 January, while Congo saw a roughly 60-hour election blackout.
Cloudflare said drone strikes damaged AWS data centres in the Middle East, disrupting power and connectivity and causing fire and water damage that raised risks for distributed applications.
Storms, submarine cable incidents and technical failures also hit Portugal, Congo and Orange Guinée, highlighting internet access as critical infrastructure vulnerable to political control, conflict and climate-related shocks.
When data centers become military targets, is any part of the global internet truly safe from physical conflict?
As digital walls rise, can satellite internet and other tech truly defeat state-sponsored internet blackouts?
Who really controls the internet in a warzone: the state with its army or the corporation with its cloud?
Military Strikes, Government Shutdowns, and Infrastructure Failures: The 60+ Internet Outages Shaping Early 2026
Overview
In early 2026, digital and physical infrastructure faced unprecedented attacks and failures that disrupted millions of lives. Iranian drone strikes damaged AWS data centers in the Middle East, causing widespread cloud service outages that crippled businesses. Meanwhile, Russian assaults on Ukraine’s energy grid destroyed over half the country’s power capacity, triggering a severe humanitarian crisis. Additionally, a major subsea cable fault near Congo degraded internet connectivity across West Africa, while a software failure at Verizon caused extensive outages in the US. These events reveal how physical attacks and technical faults on centralized systems can cascade into broad societal and economic disruptions, highlighting urgent needs for resilience and diversified infrastructure.