Cloudflare Issues First Quarter 2025 Internet Disruptions Report
Connectivity cloud company Cloudflare has released its Q1 Internet Disruptions report, detailing the impacts and causes of internet outages around the world – including a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in March with recovery efforts still ongoing, an island-wide outage caused by a monkey, cyberattacks on Russian networks, and the surprising absence of government-directed shutdowns.
Overseeing roughly 25% of the world’s internet and operating in over 125 countries, Cloudflare has a bird’s eye view on how the internet is functioning at a global level.
Highlights from the report include:
Ukrainian hackers take Russian network offline: In January, Russian networks were taken offline by a reported cyberattack by the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, which resulted in its complete failure for over a day.
Zero government-directed shutdowns marks rare milestone: For only the third time in this report’s three-year history, we observed no government-directed internet shutdowns this quarter, following a single shutdown in the fourth quarter of 2024. Cloudflare expects that it will be short-lived if countries like Iraq and Syria take such measures to prevent cheating on nationwide exams.
Myanmar recovers from the consequences of 7.7 magnitude earthquake: The March 28, 2025, earthquake caused immediate traffic drops of up to 97% in affected regions, with some networks still showing disruption two weeks later. Recovery efforts are still ongoing.
Multiple countries hit by widespread power outages (one monkey-caused): Several nations experienced significant disruptions due to power failures, including a monkey coming into contact with a grid transformer causing an island-wide outage in Sri Lanka, an explosion and fire at Panama’s La Chorrera power plant, and a ground fault in El Salvador affecting Honduras.
Fibre cuts and cable damage create extended outages: Syria experienced two major outages due to sabotage of fiber optic cables, while a submarine cable fault near Qatar impacted internet quality in Pakistan.
