Q2 2026 Internet Disruptions: From Typhoons to DNSSEC Failures

Cloudflare Radar's quarterly review of Internet disruptions reveals a familiar truth: connectivity fails in many ways, but the impact on users is often the same. In Q2 2026, the longest outage came from a super typhoon near Guam, while the most frequent disruptions were government-mandated shutdowns tied to exam periods in Sudan. Iran completed a partial restoration after an 88-day national blackout, and a cable cut in Saint Lucia plus a DNSSEC misconfiguration in Germany highlighted how fragile—and how resilient—the Internet's underlying systems can be.

This summary covers the most significant confirmed disruptions observed between April and June 2026. A complete catalog of detected anomalies is available in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center.

Storms, Earthquakes, and Power Failures

Super Typhoon Sinlaku, the strongest storm of the 2026 Pacific typhoon season to date, passed just north of Guam in mid-April. While the island avoided a direct hit, tropical-storm-force winds knocked out power and disrupted water systems. Internet traffic from Guam fell as much as 80% below expected levels on April 13–14.

On June 24, two major earthquakes struck northern Venezuela within about a minute of each other, centered near Yumare and San Felipe, followed by an aftershock off the coast near Caracas. The first, a 7.5 magnitude quake, occurred at approximately 22:04 UTC. Cloudflare Radar shows a sharp simultaneous decrease in HTTP traffic across multiple providers, including Fibex Telecom (which APNIC data estimates serves 1.6 million users), the state-owned CANTV, and the regional ISP VNET.

A few days later, a power outage in Tanzania on June 27 caused a distinct drop in HTTP traffic lasting at least five hours. Although the cause was an infrastructure failure rather than a deliberate government action like the country's October 2025 election-related blackout, the resulting telemetry and user impact were nearly identical: a sudden, drastic loss of connectivity.

These events underscore how physical-world shocks—weather, seismic activity, and electrical grid failures—translate directly into digital disruption, and why redundancy in power, routing, and physical paths matters for Internet resilience.

Government Control: Shutdowns and Restoration in the Middle East

On May 26, Cloudflare Radar began observing signs of Iran's previously announced Internet restoration, ending an 88-day national blackout that had begun on February 28. By May 27, traffic had returned to 40% of pre-outage levels, consistent with reports that access was being reintroduced selectively. Since then, HTTP bytes have climbed as high as 90% before settling around 59% of pre-shutdown levels—a volume similar to what was observed in February, suggesting connectivity has returned to its most recent pre-shutdown baseline rather than fully normalizing.

Meanwhile, HTTP traffic to AWS's me-central-1 region in the United Arab Emirates remained low throughout the quarter. AWS service reports from April 30 confirmed that the region "has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications." This follows earlier reports from March 3 that facilities in the UAE and Bahrain experienced physical impacts from drone strikes, with two UAE facilities "directly struck" and a Bahrain facility affected by a nearby strike. The reduced traffic is a downstream effect of physical damage to data center infrastructure, not a network fault.

Government-mandated shutdowns also occurred in Iraq and Sudan during Q2 2026, all imposed to prevent cheating during national exams—a seasonal pattern observed across multiple prior quarters. Sudan experienced 10 such outages between April 13 and 23, each lasting approximately 3.5 hours from 11:45 to 15:15 UTC. Iraq had three shorter shutdowns, each about 90 minutes long, on June 2, June 11, and June 28, timed around exam hours.

Whether through deliberate shutdown or selective restoration, these events illustrate the degree of control governments can exert over national Internet access.

Cable Cuts and Cryptographic Failures

A DNSSEC key rollover at DENIC, the registry for Germany's .de domain, began producing invalid signatures on May 5. Key rollovers are routine maintenance, but when the new signatures don't match what validating resolvers expect, those resolvers reject queries as potentially tampered with and return SERVFAIL errors. As a result, .de websites became unreachable worldwide until normal operation was restored at 23:15 UTC.

Cloudflare Radar observed a rise in global .de query volume during the incident. This is because failed answers cannot be cached, so lookups that would normally be served from cache were repeatedly re-resolved and retried, generating additional traffic. From a user's perspective, the failure manifested as pages failing to load, email bouncing, and app timeouts—symptoms indistinguishable from a conventional outage.

In the Caribbean, a fiber cut near Saint Lucia on June 21 caused connectivity from Karib Cable's network to fall to essentially zero around 21:00 UTC. Traffic remained flat for nearly a day before recovering to expected levels around 17:00 UTC on June 22. Since Karib Cable is one of the largest providers on the island, the country-level impact was significant: Saint Lucia's overall traffic dropped approximately 60% against the prior week for the duration of the cut. Caribbean networks depend heavily on limited terrestrial and submarine paths, so a single break can disproportionately reduce capacity.

Q2 2026 saw disruptions from severe weather, earthquakes, power outages, government policy, physical damage to cloud infrastructure, cable cuts, and a DNSSEC misconfiguration—a testament to the interconnected systems the Internet relies on, and how failure in any one of them can ripple outward.