- The Cloudflare report outlines the biggest issues affecting the global internet in 2025
- Power outages remained one of the fastest ways to knock regions offline, and weather events repeatedly overwhelmed infrastructure never designed for extremes
- Cable damage continued to disrupt entire countries with surprisingly small physical failures
Internet connectivity in 2025 showed frequent and visible failures across multiple regions, with a new comprehensive report highlighting some of the biggest struggles seen in 2025
Traffic data collected by Cloudflare over the course of the year recorded more than 180 major disruptions, with the last quarter reflecting patterns seen in the past rather than unusual anomalies.
Cloudflare noted that these incidents affected both evolving and advanced networks, challenging assumptions about redundancy and resiliency.
Power systems are a critical weak point
Records from the end of 2025 show that everyday infrastructure weaknesses continued to outweigh extraordinary causes.
Power outages repeatedly caused sudden drops in Internet availability, such as a transmission line fault in the Dominican Republic that escalated into a nationwide blackout, cutting Internet traffic by about half for extended periods.
Kenya experienced reduced connectivity following instability on its regional power link with Uganda, with effects lasting hours outside major cities, and in Ukraine, drone strikes damaged energy facilities near Odesa, causing local outages and ongoing traffic reductions during repair work.
These events showed how closely internet access remained coupled to fragile power infrastructure.
Extreme weather exacerbated existing vulnerabilities across multiple regions. Hurricane Melissa hit 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, resulting in 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. But not all disturbances were due to external shocks or environmental damage.
Network operators experienced outages related to internal technical failures, including routing rollbacks and DNS failures.
Providers in the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel and Indonesia recorded service losses that appeared to be total for users despite intact underlying networks.
Major 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 the most notable case of election-related unrest.
Most outages instead stemmed from routine operational issues rather than deliberate limitations, 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 the adequacy of existing approaches.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
