Cloudflare Radar Q3 2026: 49 Internet disruptions, led by Iraq exam shutdowns and power failures
Cloudflare's quarterly review counts 19 government shutdowns, 14 power outages and five natural disasters, from Cuba's September blackout to a Honduras exchange-point failure.
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Cloudflare's Radar team recorded 49 Internet disruptions between July and September 2026, and its quarterly review published on 27 October finds that the biggest causes were not hackers or software bugs but government exam shutdowns in Iraq and failing power grids. The pattern matters for anyone who runs services across borders: the weak points of the Internet in Q3 were electricity, buildings and policy.
Key points
- Cloudflare Radar recorded 49 disruptions in Q3 2026: 19 government-directed shutdowns (18 of them Iraqi exam shutdowns), 14 power outages and five natural disasters.
- A three-day blackout in Cuba from 18 to 20 September was one of four power-related outages Radar saw there in the quarter; traffic fell by between 18% and 59% in those events.
- On 10 September a power failure at an interconnection facility in Honduras hit at least 11 major providers, and HTTP traffic fell 63% for about three hours (Cloudflare's measurement; we found no independent report).
- Fourteen disruptions recovered in under an hour and 16 within three hours, according to Cloudflare.
- Cloudflare says its network handles more than 20% of web traffic, so Radar sees only what its customers' traffic shows.
What happened
Cloudflare publishes a disruption summary every quarter, built from events detected and annotated on Cloudflare Radar. The Q3 edition, by Lai Yi Ohlsen, counts 49 events. Government-directed shutdowns were the most frequent at 19, and power outages followed with 14. Natural disasters accounted for five. By subtraction (our arithmetic, not a Cloudflare figure) the remaining 11 had other causes, which the post describes individually: cable cuts, conflict-related damage, cooling failure and faults inside single networks.
The chart shows the three categories Cloudflare reports with counts; the other 11 incidents are not broken down in one number in the post.
Background
Cloudflare has run these quarterly reviews for several years. The Q2 2026 edition, as summarised by SecurityMEA, was dominated by Iran, where traffic returned from 26 May after an 88-day near-total shutdown that began on 28 February and then settled at about 59% of pre-shutdown levels. In Q2 Sudan and Iraq together imposed 13 exam-related shutdowns, and traffic to AWS's me-central-1 region in the UAE stayed significantly below normal, which that report attributed to physical damage from regional conflict. Q3 looks different: no single national blackout of Iran's scale, but many smaller failures spread across more countries.
The numbers
Exam shutdowns. Iraq accounts for 18 of the 19 government-directed shutdowns. Cloudflare says they ran on a strict schedule from 03:30 to 04:00 UTC and lasted about 15 to 90 minutes each, with most between 26 August and 28 September and three between 1 and 8 July. Cloudflare quotes the Internet Society's Pulse reporting that Iraq's communications minister, Mustafa Sanad, confirmed the shutdowns and promised a digital exam system that would end the need for them. Syria and Sudan, which have used exam shutdowns in recent years, recorded none this quarter; Cloudflare thinks that reflects exam calendars rather than a policy change.
Power. Radar logged 14 power-related disruptions across 10 countries, including Cuba, Honduras, Ukraine, Eswatini, Botswana, Tajikistan, Kenya, Saint Lucia, Georgia and Gabon.
The Ukrainian figures are "up to" values for the 12 August event, and Nepal's is "up to 18%", per Cloudflare.
- Cuba. Four power-related outages on 6 July, 14 July, 3 August and 18 to 20 September, with traffic falls from 18% (14 July) to 59% (3 August). The September event matches wire reports: Reuters said the energy ministry reported a failure of the national grid that left about 9 million people without power, and AP described a transmission fault in the west that spread. Outlets disagree on how many nationwide collapses Cuba has had this year (AP said at least the sixth, another outlet the seventh), so we do not give a count.
- Honduras. Cloudflare says a power failure on 10 September at an interconnection facility affected at least 11 major providers for about three hours, with HTTP traffic down 63%. Two networks (Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala, AS14754, and mobile carrier Celtel, AS52262) were unaffected, which Cloudflare reads as a sign they depend more on infrastructure outside the country. We found no independent report of this event, so treat the details as Cloudflare's.
- Phoenix. On 13 August a cooling failure at a data centre caused a near-total drop in traffic from Namecheap (AS22612).
How the physical world takes networks offline
Cloudflare's explanation is simple: when electricity fails, routers, mobile base stations, data centres and interconnection facilities fail with it. Two Guam storms illustrate the lag. Super Typhoon Sinlaku, covered in last quarter's report, took four days for HTTP traffic to return to typical levels. Super Typhoon Bavi followed in under three months, and even with an earlier state of emergency the Guam Power Authority reported that only about 25% of distribution feeders were online at one point.
Elsewhere a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia in August caused a disruption of four and a half days, with fibre damage cutting traffic from Colombia Telecomunicaciones (AS3816). A magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Kumamoto, Japan prompted evacuation orders for roughly 150,000 people, with the effect mostly visible in desktop traffic. In Nepal, flash floods on 26 August caused a two-hour outage with HTTP traffic down by up to 18%.
What it means
For operators. Concentration is the lesson of Honduras: one interconnection facility took down at least 11 providers. If your users sit in a country with a single exchange point, check whether your DNS, CDN and authentication paths depend on infrastructure inside that country or outside it. The two Honduran networks that stayed up did so, Cloudflare suggests, because they route through foreign infrastructure.
For developers. Plan for short, repeated outages rather than one big one: most disruptions were brief (14 recovered within an hour), but a scheduled shutdown like Iraq's recurs at the same time, so retry logic, offline modes and exam-season capacity planning are practical responses.
For policy. Government shutdowns remain the single largest category, and the Iraqi minister's stated plan to remove the need for them is a test of whether an announced alternative actually ends the practice.
What we don't know yet
- Cloudflare sees its own customers' traffic, so Radar can miss disruptions in networks with little Cloudflare traffic, and traffic dips are not the same as outage severity.
- Cloudflare says Radar data alone cannot show whether fibre damage in Russia's Far East on 19 September, during nationwide elections, was related to them. Rostelecom called it deliberate damage to backbone lines and restored service via backup channels.
- Only Cloudflare reported the Honduras facility failure in the sources we could find.
- The count of 49 covers events Cloudflare detected and annotated, not all disruptions worldwide.
What to watch next
Watch whether Iraq's promised digital exam system arrives before the next exam season, how Guam and Cuba rebuild or stabilise power, and whether Cloudflare's Q4 report shows the same reliance on physical infrastructure. Cloudflare Radar publishes events as they happen at radar.cloudflare.com.
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