Physical failures and DNS faults drove more than 180 internet disruptions in 2025

Cloudflare reported it observed more than 180 internet disruptions worldwide during 2025, with outages ranging from short local incidents to multiday national failures affecting major cloud providers and networks. The report said the most dramatic outages stemmed from physical infrastructure failures, especially submarine cable breaks and national power grid problems.

Examples cited include two international fiber cuts that pushed Digicel traffic nearly to zero in Haiti, a transmission line failure in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 11 that cut internet traffic by nearly 50% until the grid was mostly restored, and a Kenya blackout on Dec. 9 that depressed national traffic by up to 18% for nearly four hours.

The war in Ukraine also showed up in traffic graphs: a reported Russian drone strike in Odessa cut internet throughput by 57%. Cloudflare identified technical failures as the top cause of outages, with Domain Name System (DNS) problems frequently at fault. The report noted Italy's Fastweb experienced a DNS resolution issue on Oct.

22 that knocked traffic down more than 75% for wired customers, and that a major AWS failure was due to DNS. Cloudflare said it is using a new Radar Cloud Observatory to track availability across AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud at regional levels, and acknowledged two of its own outages in late 2025 tied to a database permissions change on Nov.

Key Topics

Tech, Cloudflare, Dns, Submarine Cables, Power Grid, Aws