Cloudflare flags Q1 internet disruptions

Cloudflare said the first quarter of 2026 brought a sharp rise in internet disruptions, with Uganda and Iran imposing prolonged shutdowns and conflict hitting cloud infrastructure. (blog.cloudflare.com) The company’s April 28 review covered outages through March 31 and said government-ordered blackouts, power failures, cable damage and military action all cut connectivity. (blog.cloudflare.com) In Uganda, authorities ordered operators to suspend public internet access before the January 15 presidential election. Cloudflare said traffic at the Uganda Internet Exchange Point fell from roughly 72 gigabits per second to 1 gigabit per second. (blog.cloudflare.com) Cloudflare said traffic from Uganda stayed near zero until late January 17, when service was partly restored after President Yoweri Museveni was declared the winner of a seventh term. Full restoration was announced on January 26. (blog.cloudflare.com) Iran saw a separate, longer-running disruption. Cloudflare said internet access was mostly shut off in January after anti-government protests, and later restrictions tied to the conflict that began with U.S. strikes on February 28 were still ongoing as the quarter ended. (blog.cloudflare.com) (datacenterdynamics.com) The report also tracked physical attacks on cloud infrastructure in the Middle East. DatacenterDynamics, citing Cloudflare, said Iranian drone strikes caused brief outages at Amazon Web Services and Oracle data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. (datacenterdynamics.com) Power was another failure point. Cloudflare said Cuba’s national electrical grid collapsed three separate times in March, while shorter power outages disrupted connectivity in Argentina, Moldova, Ukraine, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands. (blog.cloudflare.com) (datacenterdynamics.com) Other disruptions came from damaged cables, storms and technical faults. Cloudflare cited cable damage in the Republic of Congo, storm-related outages in Portugal, and provider issues affecting Verizon Wireless in the United States, Orange Guinee in Guinea and TalkTalk in the United Kingdom. (blog.cloudflare.com) (datacenterdynamics.com) The shift was notable because Cloudflare’s Q1 2025 review reported no government-directed shutdowns at all. One year later, the company’s quarter opened with election and protest blackouts and closed with war-related outages still in place. (blog.cloudflare.com 1) (blog.cloudflare.com 2) Cloudflare’s data points to a broader pattern: internet access failed not just at telecom networks, but at the level of state policy, electric grids, submarine cables and concentrated cloud regions. In Q1 2026, those layers broke in the same quarter. (blog.cloudflare.com)