The fourth quarter of 2025 saw a diverse array of Internet disruptions affecting millions of users worldwide. From submarine cable cuts to extreme weather events, the period highlighted the fragility and resilience of global Internet infrastructure. Cloudflare tracked over 180 Internet disruptions throughout 2025, with Q4 presenting unique challenges across multiple continents.
Government-Directed Shutdowns
Tanzania's Election Shutdown
Tanzania experienced a significant Internet shutdown on October 29 as violent protests erupted during the country's presidential election. Traffic initially fell around 12:30 local time, dropping more than 90% lower than the previous week. The disruption lasted approximately 26 hours before traffic began returning around 14:30 local time on October 30.
However, this restoration proved brief. Just two hours after traffic returned, another near-complete outage occurred around 16:15 local time. This second shutdown lasted until November 3, when traffic aggressively returned after 17:00 local time.
Interestingly, nominal drops in announced IPv4 and IPv6 address space were observed during the shutdown, but there was never a complete loss of announcements, which would have signified total disconnection from the Internet. Tanzania's president later expressed sympathy for diplomatic community members and foreigners regarding the shutdown's impact.
Submarine Cable Cuts
Submarine cable cuts proved to be a recurring theme throughout Q4 2025, affecting connectivity across multiple regions.
Digicel Haiti
Digicel Haiti, unfortunately familiar with cable cut incidents, experienced two separate disruptions during the quarter. On October 16, traffic began falling at 14:30 local time, reaching near zero by 16:00. The company's Director General posted about two cuts on international fiber optic infrastructure. Traffic recovered within an hour after the first fiber was repaired.
On November 25, another cut on National Road 1 caused a complete outage between 02:00-08:00 local time. All services were restored by 08:22 local time.
Pakistan's PEACE Cable Cut
On October 20, Cybernet/StormFiber in Pakistan experienced a significant disruption when the PEACE submarine cable suffered damage in the Red Sea near Sudan. Traffic dropped sharply, falling approximately 50%, while announced IPv4 address space dropped by over a third.
The PEACE cable is one of several submarine cable systems carrying international Internet traffic for Pakistani providers. While the provider pledged full restoration by October 27, traffic and announced address space recovered to near expected levels by around 02:00 local time on October 21.
Cameroon's WACS Cable Issues
Unusual traffic patterns across multiple Internet providers in Cameroon on October 23 were caused by problems on the West Africa Cable System (WACS) submarine cable connecting countries along Africa's west coast to Portugal.
MTN informed subscribers that "following an incident on the WACS fiber optic cable, Internet service is temporarily disrupted." Camtel reported that a technical incident involving WACS cable equipment in Batoke occurred in early hours of October 23.
Traffic across impacted providers fell around 05:00 local time before recovering to expected levels around 22:00 local time. Traffic was highly volatile during the day, dropping 90-99% at times, possibly due to attempts to shift traffic to other submarine cable systems connecting to Cameroon.
Dominican Republic's Claro Outage
On December 9, Claro Dominicana experienced sharp traffic drops around 12:15 local time. Traffic levels fell again around 14:15, bottoming out 77% lower than the previous week before quickly returning to expected levels.
The connectivity disruption was caused by two fiber optic outages. Claro's social media posts during the outage noted they were "causing intermittency and slowness in some services." Technicians restored Internet services nationwide by repairing the severed cables.
Power Outages
Dominican Republic Transmission Line Failure
A transmission line outage on November 11 caused electrical service interruption across the Dominican Republic. This power outage impacted Internet traffic, resulting in a nearly 50% drop compared to the prior week, starting at 13:15 local time.
Traffic levels remained lower until approximately 02:00 local time on December 12. A technical report later found that the blackout began at the 138 kV San Pedro de Macorís I substation, where a live line was manually disconnected, triggering a high-intensity short circuit.
Kenya's Regional Power Disruption
On December 9, a major power outage impacted multiple regions across Kenya. Kenya Power explained the outage "was triggered by an incident on the regional Kenya-Uganda interconnected power network, which caused a disturbance on the Kenyan side of the system."
While Kenya Power claimed power was restored to most affected areas within approximately 30 minutes, impacts to Internet connectivity lasted nearly four hours, between 19:15-23:00 local time. The power outage caused traffic to drop as much as 18% at a national level, with shifts most visible in Nakuru County and Kaimbu County.
Military Action
Odesa, Ukraine
Russian drone strikes on the Odesa region in Ukraine on December 12 damaged warehouses and energy infrastructure. The latter caused power outages in parts of the region, disrupting Internet connectivity and causing traffic to drop by as much as 57% compared to the prior week.
After the initial drop at midnight on December 13, traffic gradually recovered over the following several days, returning to expected levels around 14:30 local time on December 16.
Extreme Weather
Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica
Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica on October 28, leaving destruction in its path. Associated power outages and infrastructure damage impacted Internet connectivity, causing traffic to initially drop by approximately half starting around 06:15 local time, ultimately reaching as much as 70% lower than the previous week.
Internet traffic from Jamaica remained well below pre-hurricane levels for several days, starting to make greater progress toward expected levels during the morning of November 4. Following storms that cause massive widespread damage, it often takes weeks or months for Internet traffic to return to normal levels—while power may be largely restored within days, physical infrastructure damage takes significantly longer to address.
Cyclone Senyar in Sri Lanka and Indonesia
On November 26, Cyclone Senyar caused catastrophic floods and landslides in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, killing over 1,000 people and damaging telecommunications and power infrastructure. Infrastructure damage resulted in disruptions to Internet connectivity across multiple regions.
In Sri Lanka, regions outside the main Western Province were most affected. Several provinces saw traffic drop between 80% and 95% compared to the prior week, including North Western, Southern, Uva, Eastern, Northern, North Central, and Sabaragamuwa provinces.
In Indonesia, Aceh and Sumatra regions saw the biggest Internet disruptions. In Aceh, traffic initially dropped over 75% compared to the previous week. In Sumatra, North Sumatra was most affected, with an early 30% drop before starting to recover more actively the following week.
Technical Problems
DNS Resolution Failures
Several significant outages during Q4 2025 were caused by DNS resolution issues rather than connectivity failures.
#### Fastweb Italy
On October 22, a DNS resolution issue disrupted Internet services for customers of Italian provider Fastweb, causing observed traffic volumes to drop by over 75%. The issue impacted wired Internet customers between 09:30-13:00 local time.
Although not an Internet outage caused by connectivity failure, the impact of DNS resolution issues on Internet traffic is very similar. When a provider's DNS resolver experiences problems, switching to services like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver will often restore connectivity.
#### Cellcom Israel
On December 18, Israeli provider Cellcom experienced a malfunction affecting Internet connectivity for some customers. This dropped traffic nearly 70% compared to the prior week, occurring between 09:30-11:00 local time. The malfunction may have been a DNS failure according to published reports.
#### Partner Communications Israel
Closing out 2025, on December 30, a major technical failure at Israeli provider Partner Communications disrupted mobile, TV, and Internet services across the country. Internet traffic fell by two-thirds compared to the previous week between 14:00-15:00 local time.
During the outage, queries to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver spiked, suggesting the problem may have been related to Partner's DNS infrastructure, though the provider didn't publicly confirm the cause.
Other Technical Issues
#### Smartfren Indonesia
On October 3, subscribers to Indonesian Internet provider Smartfren experienced a service disruption. The provider acknowledged in a social media post that "telephone, SMS and data services are experiencing problems in several areas."
Traffic fell as much as 84%, starting around 09:00 local time. The disruption lasted approximately eight hours, with traffic returning to expected levels around 17:00 local time. Smartfren provided no additional information about what caused the service problems.
#### Vodafone UK
Major British Internet provider Vodafone UK experienced a brief service outage on October 23. At 15:00 local time, traffic on both Vodafone autonomous systems dropped to zero. Announced IPv4 address space fell by 75% from one network and disappeared entirely from another.
Both Internet traffic and address space recovered two hours later, returning to expected levels around 17:00 local time. Vodafone provided no information on their social media channels about the outage cause, and their network status checker page was also unavailable during the outage.
Cloud Platform Incidents
During Q4, Cloudflare launched a new Cloud Observatory page on Radar tracking availability and performance issues at a region level across hyperscaler cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services us-east-1
On October 20, the AWS us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia experienced increased error rates and latencies affecting multiple services. Issues impacted not only customers with public-facing websites and applications, but also Cloudflare customers with origin resources hosted in us-east-1.
Cloudflare began seeing impact around 06:30 UTC, as the share of error responses began climbing, reaching as high as 17% around 08:00 UTC. Connection failures when attempting to connect to origins in us-east-1 climbed as well, peaking around 12:00 UTC.
Key network performance metrics remained elevated throughout the incident, returning to normal levels just before the incident ended around 23:00 UTC.
Microsoft Azure Front Door
On October 29, Microsoft Azure experienced an incident impacting Azure Front Door, its content delivery network service. According to Azure's report, "A specific sequence of customer configuration changes, performed across two different control plane build versions, resulted in incompatible customer configuration metadata being generated."
Cloudflare observed the volume of failed connection attempts to Azure-hosted origins begin to climb about 45 minutes before the reported start time. TCP and TLS handshake metrics became more volatile during the incident period, with TCP handshakes taking over 50% longer at times and TLS handshakes taking nearly 200% longer at peak.
Lessons and Observations
The disruptions observed in Q4 2025 underscore the importance of real-time data in maintaining global connectivity. Whether government-ordered shutdowns or minor technical issues, transparency allows the technical community to respond faster and more effectively.
Cloudflare continues tracking these shifts on Cloudflare Radar's Outage Center, via social media, and in blog posts. The underlying data is available from Cloudflare's API for local monitoring or analysis, and the Radar MCP server can incorporate Radar data into AI tools.
Source: Cable cuts, storms, and DNS: a look at Internet disruptions in Q4 2025 - Cloudflare Blog