Cloudflare reports Iran recovery amid global outages

Cloudflare has published its Q2 2026 Internet Disruptions report, which tracked outages linked to natural disasters, government shutdowns and infrastructure faults.

The quarter marked a shift from the previous period. Iran began restoring access after a prolonged blackout, even as other parts of the global network faced repeated interruptions.

Cloudflare monitors internet traffic across a network spanning more than 330 cities in over 125 countries, giving it a broad view of connectivity failures as they happen. Its latest findings describe a quarter shaped by severe weather, power cuts, war-related infrastructure damage, cable failures and domain name system errors.

One of the most significant developments was in Iran, where internet access started to return after an 88-day near-total shutdown. Signs of restoration began on May 26, and traffic later rose to as much as 90% of pre-outage levels before settling at about 59%.

That made Iran one of the quarter's clearest reversals after months in which users had been largely cut off from the wider internet. The restored volume broadly matched traffic levels seen in February between separate shutdown periods, suggesting a return to a recent baseline rather than a full recovery.

Government controls

Elsewhere, state-directed shutdowns remained a recurring feature of internet disruption. Cloudflare recorded 10 outages in Sudan between April 13 and 23, and three in Iraq during June, all tied to national exam periods.

In Sudan, the outages followed a fixed daily pattern and lasted about 3.5 hours. In Iraq, each shutdown lasted around 90 minutes. The repeated use of network restrictions during exams adds to a pattern seen over several quarters in both countries.

The report also highlighted the continuing effect of conflict on cloud infrastructure in the Middle East. Traffic to Amazon Web Services' me-central-1 region in the United Arab Emirates remained depressed throughout the quarter, following earlier reports of physical damage linked to drone strikes and regional conflict.

Cloudflare's analysis indicated that the weakness in traffic was not due to a simple network issue, but to damage affecting the underlying data centre infrastructure. That, in turn, disrupted websites and applications hosted in the region.

Weather and power

Natural disasters also caused major interruptions. Super Typhoon Sinlaku, which passed just north of Guam in mid-April, caused the quarter's longest outage. Traffic from the territory fell by as much as 80% below expected levels over two days after the storm knocked out power and disrupted water systems.

In Venezuela, two major earthquakes in the north of the country were followed by a sharp drop in internet traffic. The immediate impact was visible across several providers, including Fibex Telecom, CANTV and VNET.

A few days later, Tanzania experienced a separate connectivity shock when a power failure caused a steep fall in HTTP traffic that lasted at least five hours. Although the cause differed from the country's election-related blackout in 2025, the effect on users was similar, disrupting communications and access to news.

Fragile systems

Europe and the Caribbean saw different forms of technical failure. In Germany, a DNSSEC key rollover at DENIC, the registry for the .de domain, generated invalid signatures and temporarily made .de websites unreachable to validating resolvers around the world.

The failure did not bring down the wider German internet, but it blocked access to sites using the country code top-level domain until the problem was fixed. Global query volumes for .de domains rose during the incident because failed responses could not be cached and had to be retried repeatedly.

Saint Lucia faced a more direct connectivity loss. A fibre cut near the island caused traffic from Karib Cable's network to collapse to near zero for much of a day before recovering. Because the provider is one of the country's largest, national traffic dropped by about 60% compared with the previous week.

The incidents highlight the range of weaknesses that can disrupt online access, from physical breaks in subsea or terrestrial links to errors in essential internet trust systems. They also show how local failures can quickly affect large numbers of users where alternative routes are limited.

Cloudflare said the quarter showed that internet disruption can stem from "severe weather, an earthquake, power outages, government-directed shutdowns, damage to cloud infrastructure, cable cuts, and a DNSSEC misconfiguration."