- Cloudflare Report Outlines the Biggest Issues Affecting the Global Internet in 2025
- Power outages remained one of the quickest ways to knock regions offline, and weather events repeatedly overwhelmed infrastructure that was never designed for extreme conditions.
- Cable damage continued to disrupt entire countries with surprisingly minimal physical outages
Internet connectivity in 2025 has shown frequent and visible failures in several regions, with a wide-ranging new report highlighting some of the biggest challenges faced in 2025.
Traffic data compiled by Cloudflare over the year recorded more than 180 major disruptions, with the most recent quarter reflecting trends observed earlier than unusual anomalies.
Cloudflare noted that these incidents affected both developing and advanced networks, challenging assumptions about redundancy and resilience.
Electrical systems are a critical weak point
Records from the end of 2025 show that everyday infrastructure weaknesses continue to outweigh extraordinary causes.
Power outages have repeatedly caused sudden drops in Internet availability, such as a transmission line outage in the Dominican Republic that escalated into a nationwide blackout, reducing Internet traffic by about half for extended periods.
Kenya experienced reduced connectivity following instability in its regional power interconnection with Uganda, with effects lasting for hours outside major cities, and in Ukraine, drone strikes damaged energy facilities near Odessa, causing local outages and sustained traffic reductions during repair efforts.
These events showed how Internet access remains closely tied to fragile electricity infrastructure.
Extreme weather conditions have 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 approaching 95% outside major urban centers.
Fiber cuts have added even more strain, with repeated damage to international cables disrupting service in Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon and neighboring countries.
Incidents like this show how physical exposure continues to harm global connectivity. However, not all disruptions come from external shocks or environmental damage.
Network operators have experienced outages related to internal technical faults, including routing takedowns and DNS outages.
Providers in the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel and Indonesia experienced losses of service that appeared total to users despite the integrity of the underlying networks.
Large cloud platforms also experienced incidents that reduced application availability across regions, illustrating how centralized dependencies could amplify localized outages.
Government-ordered shutdowns remained limited during this period, with Tanzania representing the most notable case during election-related unrest.
Most disruptions came from routine operational issues rather than deliberate restrictions, and real-time monitoring helped document these failures, although transparency from operators remained inconsistent.
Events in late 2025 suggest that Internet reliability continues to depend more on core physical systems than on advanced network design.
Decades of investment have not eliminated predictable failure modes, and the persistence of these weaknesses raises the question of whether existing approaches are sufficient.
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