Cloudflare reports Q4 fall in shutdowns amid outages

Cloudflare has reported a sharp fall in government-directed internet shutdowns in the final quarter of 2025, alongside widespread disruptions linked to cable damage, extreme weather and conflict-related power outages.

The company said it observed more than 180 internet disruptions across 2025. It recorded a single government-ordered shutdown in the fourth quarter. It also tracked outages and service degradations tied to fibre cuts, submarine cable faults, power grid incidents, and provider technical failures.

Cloudflare runs a global network across more than 330 cities in over 125 countries. It uses traffic patterns and routing data on its network to identify anomalies that indicate outages or significant service impairments.

Shutdowns fall

Cloudflare highlighted Tanzania as the only country where it observed a government-directed shutdown during the quarter. It said traffic fell by more than 90% compared with the prior week during unrest linked to the country's presidential election.

The disruption began with a steep decline around midday local time. Cloudflare reported a short-lived restoration the next day. It then recorded a second near-complete outage that lasted until early November, with internet traffic returning later that day.

Tanzania's president later expressed sympathy to diplomatic staff and foreign residents over the impact of the outage, according to the report. Cloudflare also noted restrictions on internet and social media services in Tanzania ahead of the country's 2020 general elections.

Cable damage

Cloudflare said cable cuts and subsea cable damage accounted for several of the most severe disruptions it observed in the quarter. It cited incidents affecting Haiti, Pakistan, Cameroon and the Dominican Republic.

In Haiti, Cloudflare observed two outages affecting Digicel Haiti. It said traffic fell to near zero during an outage that began in the afternoon in mid-October. It reported a second incident in late November, when it observed a complete outage for several hours overnight.

In Pakistan, Cloudflare reported a sharp drop in traffic on Cybernet and StormFibre in October. It linked the incident to a cut on the PEACE submarine cable in the Red Sea near Sudan. It also observed a substantial decline in announced IPv4 address space at the same time. Cloudflare said traffic levels recovered to near expected levels within hours.

In Cameroon, Cloudflare reported volatility across multiple providers in late October. It linked the disruption to problems on the West Africa Cable System subsea cable. It said traffic levels at times fell by 90% to 99% during the day.

Cloudflare also described an incident in the Dominican Republic in December, when it observed traffic on Claro Dominicana drop sharply before returning to expected levels. It linked the disruption to two fibre optic outages that the provider referenced publicly during the incident.

Weather and war

Cloudflare said hurricanes and cyclones again underlined the link between physical infrastructure damage and connectivity loss.

It reported that Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica in late October and drove internet traffic down sharply. Cloudflare said traffic fell by about half initially and later reached as much as 70% below the prior week. It said traffic remained well below pre-hurricane levels for several days before making stronger progress in early November.

Cloudflare said Cyclone Senyar triggered catastrophic flooding and landslides in Sri Lanka and Indonesia in late November. It said infrastructure damage hit telecommunications and power systems, with traffic drops of 80% to 95% across several Sri Lankan provinces compared with the prior week. In Indonesia, it reported the largest disruptions in Aceh and Sumatra.

Conflict-related incidents also affected connectivity. Cloudflare linked a disruption in Ukraine's Odesa region to Russian drone strikes that damaged energy infrastructure. It said power outages drove internet traffic down by as much as 57% compared with the prior week, with recovery taking several days.

Technical outages

Cloudflare reported a range of outages tied to technical issues at telecoms providers, including a brief outage at Vodafone UK in October. It said traffic dropped to zero across two Vodafone autonomous systems and recovered around two hours later. Cloudflare said Vodafone did not provide information publicly on the cause during the incident. It also said Vodafone's network status checker page was unavailable during the outage.

In Italy, Cloudflare cited a reported DNS resolution issue at Fastweb in October. It said observed traffic volumes dropped by more than 75% during the disruption.

Cloudflare also observed brief disruptions across multiple providers in Benin in December. It said it was unclear whether the outage related to political events earlier in the day. It noted that the affected networks shared Cogent as an upstream provider.

Cloud platforms

Cloudflare said it launched a Cloud Observatory page within its Radar service during the quarter. The page tracks availability issues at a regional level across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Cloudflare cited an incident in Amazon Web Services' us-east-1 region in October, which Amazon described as "increased error rates and latencies". It also cited an October incident affecting Azure Front Door.

Cloudflare reported two incidents affecting its own services during the quarter. It said the first involved a software failure linked to a change in database permissions that affected Bot Management. It said the second affected a subset of customers and followed changes to request body parsing logic during work on an industry-wide React Server Components vulnerability.

"The disruptions observed in the fourth quarter underscore the importance of real-time data in maintaining global connectivity," said Cloudflare.

Cloudflare said it will continue tracking disruptions through Radar and publish verified anomalies through its outage reporting tools.