Updated
Updated · TechRadar · Aug 1
Cloudflare Details 13 Exam Shutdowns and 88-Day Iran Outage in Global Internet Disruption Report
Updated
Updated · TechRadar · Aug 1

Cloudflare Details 13 Exam Shutdowns and 88-Day Iran Outage in Global Internet Disruption Report

3 articles · Updated · TechRadar · Aug 1

Summary

  • Cloudflare’s latest Radar report says recent internet disruptions ranged from 13 government exam shutdowns to Iran’s 88-day wartime blackout, plus typhoons, earthquakes, power failures, a fiber cut and a DNSSEC error.
  • Iran’s traffic began recovering on May 26 after being almost entirely offline since Feb. 28, but it later settled near 59% of pre-shutdown levels, suggesting restrictions persisted after formal restoration.
  • AWS’s me-central-1 region in the UAE remained depressed after Iranian drone strikes damaged two UAE facilities, showing how a single cloud region can now act like a critical physical chokepoint.
  • Germany’s .de domain briefly became unreachable worldwide on May 5 after DENIC’s DNSSEC key rollover produced invalid signatures, while Guam traffic fell 80% during Typhoon Sinlaku and Saint Lucia lost about 60% after a fiber cut.
  • Cloudflare said the quarter’s outages point less to exotic one-off failures than to concentrated dependencies, where one registry, provider or cloud region can knock large populations offline.

Insights

If a single drone strike or fiber cut can cripple regional connectivity, is the dream of a truly decentralized web already dead?
How did a routine security update accidentally break millions of websites worldwide, and could it happen to the entire internet?