Outages, cable cuts, power failures, and more - 2025 was a rough year for the internet; these were its toughest moments

• Cloudflare report outlines the biggest issues affecting the global Internet in 2025
• Power failures remained one of the fastest ways to knock regions offline, and weather events repeatedly overwhelmed infrastructure that was never designed for extremes
• Cable damage continued disrupting entire countries with surprisingly small physical failures

Internet connectivity in 2025 showed frequent and visible failures across multiple regions, with a new wide-ranging report highlighting some of the biggest struggles seen in 2025

Traffic data compiled by Cloudflare over the year recorded more than 180 major disruptions, with the final quarter reflecting patterns seen earlier rather than unusual anomalies.

Cloudflare noted these incidents affected both developing and advanced networks, challenging assumptions about redundancy and resilience.

Power systems are a critical weak point

Records from late 2025 show that everyday infrastructure weaknesses continued to outweigh extraordinary causes.

Electricity failures repeatedly caused sudden drops in internet availability, such as a transmission line fault in the Dominican Republic which escalated into a nationwide blackout, cutting internet traffic by roughly half for extended periods.

Kenya experienced reduced connectivity after instability on its regional power interconnection with Uganda, with effects lasting hours outside major cities, and in Ukraine, drone strikes damaged energy facilities near Odesa, causing local outages and sustained traffic reductions during repair efforts.

These events showed how tightly internet access remained coupled to fragile power infrastructure.

Extreme weather compounded existing vulnerabilities across several regions. Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in late October 2025, immediately halving internet traffic and keeping it suppressed for days due to infrastructure damage.

Cyclone Senyar brought flooding and landslides to parts of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, producing traffic losses approaching 95% outside major urban centers.

Fiber cuts added further strain, with repeated damage to international cables disrupting service in Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon, and neighboring countries.

Such incidents showed how physical exposure continued to undermine global connectivity. However, not all disruptions stemmed from external shocks or environmental damage.

Network operators experienced outages tied to internal technical faults, including routing withdrawals and DNS failures.

Providers in the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, and Indonesia recorded service losses that appeared total to users despite intact underlying networks.

Large cloud platforms also experienced incidents that reduced application availability across regions, illustrating how centralized dependencies could amplify localized failures.

Government-directed shutdowns remained limited during this period, with Tanzania accounting for the most notable case during election-related unrest.

Most disruptions instead stemmed from routine operational issues rather than deliberate restrictions, and real-time monitoring helped document these failures, although transparency from operators remained inconsistent.

The events of late 2025 suggest that internet reliability continued to depend on basic physical systems more 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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