37 articles by David Belson.
The first quarter of 2026 saw a surge in Internet disruptions, from nationwide shutdowns in Uganda and Iran to unprecedented drone strikes on cloud infrastructure. We explore the data behind these events using Cloudflare Radar.
The last quarter of 2025 brought several notable disruptions to Internet connectivity. Cloudflare Radar data reveals the impact of cable cuts, power outages, extreme weather, technical problems, and more.
We present our 6th annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed across the globe, revealing the disruptions, advances, and metrics that defined 2025.
In Q3 2025, global Internet disruptions were caused by everything from government shutdowns to stray bullets and earthquakes. This report analyzes the traffic data behind these outages to show their real-world impact on connectivity.
Cloudflare Radar has evolved significantly since its 2020 launch, offering deeper insights into Internet security, routing, and traffic with new tools and data that help anyone understand what's happening online.
On September 29, 2025, Internet connectivity was completely shut down across Afghanistan, impacting business, education, finance, and government services. It follows regional shutdowns that began several weeks prior, ostensibly to prevent “immoral activities”.
We are extending AI-related insights on Cloudflare Radar with new industry-focused data and a breakdown of bot traffic by purpose, such as training or user action. These new views help website owners better understand the impact of AI crawlers.
In Q2 2025, we observed Internet disruptions around the world resulting from government-directed shutdowns, power outages, cable damage, a cyberattack, and technical problems, as well as several with unexplained causes.
A massive power outage struck significant portions of Portugal and Spain at 10:34 UTC on April 28, disrupting everyday activities and services. The power outage also caused Internet outages across both countries, impacting Internet traffic and connectivity.
In Q1 2025, we observed Internet disruptions around the world caused by cable damage, power outages, natural disasters, fire, a cyberattack, and technical problems. Interestingly, no government-directed shutdowns were observed during the quarter.
After a rather busy third quarter, the fourth quarter of 2024 saw significantly fewer Internet disruptions. This quarter, notable outages were caused by cable cuts, power outages, natural disasters, military action, maintenance, and government direction. Read on for the details.
The 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fifth annual review of Internet trends and patterns at both a global and country/region level. For 2024, we added several new metrics, as well as the ability to do year-over-year and geographic comparisons for selected metrics.
Two recent cable cuts that occurred in the Baltic Sea resulted in little-to-no observable impact to the affected countries, in large part because of the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe.
On Monday, September 30, customers on Verizon’s mobile network in multiple cities across the United States reported experiencing a loss of connectivity. HTTP request traffic data from Verizon’s mobile ASN (AS6167) showed nominal declines across impacted cities.
The traffic graphs on Cloudflare Radar have been enhanced to include HTTP request traffic. This new metric complements the existing bytes-based “HTTP traffic” view, and the new graphs can be found on Radar’s Overview and Traffic pages.
Cloudflare Radar is constantly monitoring the Internet for widespread disruptions. Here we examine several recent noteworthy disruptions detected in the first month of Q3, including traffic anomalies observed in Bangladesh, Syria, Pakistan, and Venezuela.
Government directed shutdowns and cable cuts were both significant sources of Internet outages in Q2 2024. This post explores these disruptions, as well as others caused by power outages, maintenance,
The new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar provides insights into the latest trends around threats found in malicious email, sources of spam and malicious email, and the adoption of technologies designed to prevent abuse of email
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the fourth quarter of 2023, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography
The 2023 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review is our fourth annual review of Internet trends and patterns observed throughout the year at both a global and country/region level...
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the third quarter of 2023, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography
Cloudflare Radar now displays country and ASN traffic anomalies in the Outage Center as they are detected, as well as publishing anomaly information via API. We are also launching Radar notifications, enabling users to subscribe to notifications about traffic anomalies
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2023, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography
During the first two weeks of June 2023, we’ve seen Iraq implementing a series of multi-hour shutdowns that will reportedly occur through mid-July, as well as Algeria taking similar actions to prevent cheating on baccalaureate exams
Following the arrest of ex-PM Imran Khan, violent protests led the Pakistani government to order the shutdown of mobile Internet services and blocking of social media platforms. We examine the impact of these shutdowns on Internet traffic in Pakistan and traffic to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2023, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography
UK ISP Virgin Media (AS5089) experienced several outages on April 4, 2023. We examine the impact to Internet traffic, availability of Virgin Media web properties, and how BGP activity may provide insights into the underlying cause
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the fourth quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography.
For Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns participant websites, overall traffic volume ramped as Election Day approached
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography
The Iranian government has disrupted Internet connectivity in response to recent protests over the death of a woman while in police custody
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools.
With the recent retirement of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, we analyzed Internet Explorer traffic trends. Breaking the traffic down by bot score revealed much of this traffic is “likely automated”
As they have done over the past several years, Syria and Sudan are implementing multi-hour nationwide Internet shutdowns. Algeria has also taken a similar approach in the past, but this year appears to be implementing more targeted website/app blocking
On June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts, impactingInternet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause
DNSSEC issues with the .fj ccTLD caused problems reaching websites on the island nation