The Internet disruptions in Q1 2026 were not random blips on a dashboard — they were a blunt reminder of how fragile connectivity remains when politics, war, weather and broken infrastructure collide. In the first three months of the year, government-directed shutdowns, power outages, military action, severe weather, cable damage and plain old technical failures all knocked millions offline across several regions. For South African readers, the takeaway is hard to miss: when the web goes down, everything from banking to business, news and emergency communication feels it immediately.
Cloudflare’s latest outage summary shows just how broad the damage was. Uganda and Iran saw prolonged national shutdowns, while Cuba suffered three separate collapses of its national electricity grid in the same quarter, each one dragging internet access down with it. Elsewhere, Ukraine continued to be hit by war-related outages, while a drone strike in the Middle East caused physical damage to Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Add in storm damage in Portugal, cable damage in the Republic of Congo, a software glitch at Verizon Wireless in the United States, and brief unexplained outages in Guinea and the UK, and the scale of the quarter becomes clearer.
This was not a comprehensive global list of every incident, but rather a confirmed overview of disruptions Cloudflare observed through its network intelligence. The company says some outages are better captured in bytes-based traffic graphs, while others are clearer in request-based graphs, depending on what best shows the real-world impact. That distinction matters, because not every internet failure looks the same. Some are abrupt and total. Others drag on slowly, with traffic limping along at reduced levels.
The sharpest political example came from Uganda, where authorities ordered a nationwide internet shutdown ahead of the 15 January presidential election. The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) told mobile operators to suspend public internet access from 18:00 local time on 13 January. Officials said the move was needed to curb “misinformation, disinformation, electoral fraud and related risks”, but the result was a near-total blackout. Domestic traffic at the Uganda Internet Exchange Point plunged from roughly 72 Gbps to 1 Gbps.
Cloudflare’s data shows that traffic from Uganda fell to effectively zero and stayed there through 17 January, when connectivity was only partially restored after Yoweri Museveni was declared winner of a seventh term. Full restoration was announced on 26 January, with MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda confirming the restrictions had been lifted. The shutdown triggered legal action against the regulator and telecom operators, and drew criticism from digital rights groups including CIPESA.
Iran saw an even more prolonged and complex disruption. Citizens there spent much of the quarter with severely limited or no internet access after two nationwide shutdowns. The first began on 8 January, with traffic collapsing to near zero and only tiny bursts of connectivity returning briefly on 21 January and again on 25 January before recovering more strongly from 27 January.
Our reporting through Cloudflare Radar shows a near-complete loss of announced IPv6 address space several hours before the traffic drop. Asiatech (AS43754) and RASANA (AS31549) were the biggest contributors to that decline, but the pattern suggests a broader filtering operation rather than a simple routing failure. The second shutdown began on 28 February, as military strikes escalated, pushing traffic from Iran to well under 1% of normal levels. Only small amounts of web and DNS traffic got through.
Q1 2026 internet disruptions exposed how fragile global connectivity is
The second Iranian blackout also stood out because there were no major shifts in announced IP address space, pointing again to heavy filtering rather than route withdrawals. Reports later suggested access may have been limited through “whitelists” and “white SIM cards”, effectively allowing only approved users and services online. By the end of March, Iran was still largely offline, and as of late April the shutdown remained in place — making it one of the longest sustained internet disruptions seen in recent years.
In the Republic of Congo, internet access was hit during the 15 March presidential election, with traffic dropping to near zero for around 60 hours. That pattern will sound familiar to observers of the country’s recent election history. Similar shutdowns were used during the 2016 and 2021 votes, even though authorities did not publicly explain the March disruption.
War remained a major driver of instability in Ukraine. On 7–8 January, Russian attacks on energy infrastructure caused power outages in Dnipropetrovsk and surrounding areas, cutting traffic by almost 50%. A similar attack on 26 January hit Kharkiv, where traffic again fell by about 50% before power was gradually restored the next day.
One of the quarter’s most alarming incidents involved Amazon Web Services in the Middle East. On 1 March, Amazon reported a fire after objects struck a data centre in the United Arab Emirates. The next day, the company confirmed that two facilities in the UAE were “directly struck” by drones, while a site in Bahrain was also taken offline after nearby damage. Cloudflare’s Cloud Observatory recorded higher connection failure rates in both the me-central-1 and me-south-1 regions for several days.
Amazon later said the strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that led to water damage. The company warned that conditions in the region were becoming unpredictable, and told customers to back up data or move workloads elsewhere. Bahrain’s AWS region was disrupted again on 23 March after additional drone activity.
Elsewhere, power failures kept knocking out connectivity in different parts of the world. A major outage in Buenos Aires on 15 January affected customers of Telecom Argentina, Telecentro and IPLAN. Paraguay lost as much as 72% of its traffic on 18 February after transmission lines failed. The Dominican Republic saw a major outage on 23 February, while the U.S. Virgin Islands suffered a power-related internet hit on 24 March after generation loss at the Richmond Power Plant and damage to an underground cable.
Cuba arguably had the most brutal electricity story of the quarter. The country’s National Electric System collapsed three times in March, with each collapse hammering internet access. The first outage on 4 March cut power across the western half of the island, including Havana. A second collapse on 16 March dropped traffic by around 65%. Then, on 21–22 March, the grid failed again, this time sending traffic down by as much as 77%.
Storms also did their part. Storm Kristin caused major disruption in Portugal on 28 January, with more than 850,000 E-Redes customers without power at one stage. Cloudflare saw internet traffic fall sharply in Leiria, Santarém and Coimbra, with some areas taking weeks to recover fully. In Guinea, an “exceptional breakdown” at Orange Guinée briefly cut calls and internet access on 6 January, while in the UK, TalkTalk customers reported a widespread outage on 25 March.
The picture from Q1 2026 is stark: internet access is still deeply vulnerable to decisions made by governments, military actors, utility failures and infrastructure damage. As we reported earlier, these outages do not just interrupt browsing — they shut down commerce, communication and public life. For South Africa, where load shedding and network instability are familiar anxieties, the quarter is a reminder that digital resilience is no longer a nice-to-have. It is essential.