- Cloudflare report outlines the biggest problems affecting the global Internet in 2025
- Power outages remained one of the quickest ways to knock regions out of service, and weather events repeatedly overwhelmed infrastructure that was never designed for extremes.
- Cable damage continued to disrupt entire countries with surprisingly small physical failures.
Internet connectivity in 2025 showed frequent and visible failures in multiple regions, and a wide-ranging new report highlights some of the biggest difficulties seen in 2025.
Traffic data compiled by Cloudflare throughout the year recorded more than 180 major outages, and the latest quarter reflected previously observed patterns rather than unusual anomalies.
Cloudflare noted that these incidents affected both developing and advanced networks, challenging assumptions about redundancy and resilience.
Power systems are a critical weak point
Records from the end of 2025 show that everyday infrastructure weaknesses continued to outweigh extraordinary causes.
Power outages repeatedly caused sudden drops in Internet availability, such as a transmission line failure in the Dominican Republic that led to a national blackout, reducing Internet traffic by approximately half for prolonged periods.
Kenya experienced reduced connectivity after instability in its regional electricity interconnection with Uganda, with effects lasting hours outside major cities, and in Ukraine, drone strikes damaged power facilities near Odessa, causing local outages and sustained traffic reductions during repair efforts.
These events demonstrated the extent to which Internet access remained tied to fragile electrical infrastructure.
Extreme weather exacerbated existing vulnerabilities in several regions. Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica in late October 2025, immediately cutting internet traffic in half and keeping it down for days due to infrastructure damage.
Cyclone Senyar caused flooding and landslides in parts of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, causing traffic losses of around 95% outside major urban centres.
Fiber outages added further strain, and repeated damage to international cables disrupted service in Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon and neighboring countries.
These incidents demonstrated how physical exposure continued to undermine global connectivity. However, not all disruptions were due to external shocks or environmental damage.
Network operators experienced outages related to internal technical failures, including routing outages and DNS failures.
Providers in the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel and Indonesia reported service losses that seemed total to users even though underlying networks were intact.
Large cloud platforms also experienced incidents that reduced application availability across regions, illustrating how centralized dependencies could amplify localized failures.
Government-ordered closures remained limited during this period, with Tanzania being the most notable case during election-related unrest.
Instead, most outages were due to routine operational issues rather than deliberate restrictions, and real-time monitoring helped document these failures, although transparency on the part of operators remained inconsistent.
The events of late 2025 suggest that Internet reliability continued to depend on basic physical systems rather than advanced network design.
Decades of investment have not eliminated predictable failure modes, and the persistence of these weaknesses raises questions about whether existing approaches are sufficient.
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