The previous quarter was a busy one for internet disruptions, according to Cloudflare, with government-mandated shutdowns in several nations, a massive power outage hitting Spain’s infrastructure, damage to fiber optic cabling, and technical issues hitting North America.
Several people wait outside the Atocha train station in Madrid on 28 April, 2025. The Iberian Peninsula lost power around 1230 local time, leading to cascading internet failures and a complete traffic lockdown – Pic: Ekaterina Chuyko/Shutterstock
The global content delivery network posted a summary overview of observed and confirmed disruptions during Q2 2025, which appears to have been notable for a number of reasons, including several unexplained outages.
Cloudflare previously noted that no governments had directed internet shutdowns during the first quarter of the year, but state-mandated cutoffs returned with a vengeance as Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Panama imposed restrictions.
Cloudflare fesses up to config change that borked internet access for all
READ MORE
In Iran’s case, there were multiple internet shutoffs following attacks on the country’s nuclear sites. Temporary restrictions were imposed for several hours on June 13, while a second round occurred on June 17, reportedly in an effort to “ward off cyber attacks.” The third, a day later, was for similar given reasons.
Internet shutoffs were observed across multiple Libyan network providers on May 16, and these were reportedly made by the country’s leaders in response to public protests against the Government of National Unity.
With Iraq, the shutdowns were said to be an effort to prevent cheating on national exams. These ran for several hours a day from May 20 through June 4 for middle school exams, and from June 14 until July 3 for preparatory school exams. In the Kurdistan region, shutdowns began June 1, and ran through July 6.
Syria also shuts off internet access to prevent cheating on exams, and like Iraq, has been doing so for several years. However, this year the government only ordered a temporary cellular blackout in areas near to examination centers. This happened on June 21, 24, and 29 for the “Basic Education Certificate,” and is scheduled between July 12 and August 3 for Secondary Education.
In Panama, a government mandated suspension of cellular and residential internet services began on June 21 in response to protests and demonstrations. This was supposed to end June 25, but was extended until June 29.
Power fail
The massive power outage that hit Spain and parts of Portugal on April 28 not surprisingly had a major effect on the internet. The electricity blackout was caused by multiple technical failures, with internet traffic falling by approximately 80 percent within the next few hours in Spain, and up to 90 percent in Portugal. It returned to expected levels around 0100 local time on April 29.
Morocco also appears to have been affected by the Spain incident – telco Orange Maroc reported that its traffic had been disrupted following the outage which affected international connections.
Other territories where a power outage led to widespread internet disruption during the quarter include Curaçao, the Maldives, North Macedonia, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Puerto Rico.
Elsewhere, damage to fiber cabling was the cause of internet outages for some operators. Digicel in Haiti suffered a complete loss of internet service on May 28, which appears to have been due to damaged cables on land rather than subsea infrastructure. Likewise, Airtel in Malawi experienced a 90-minute internet outage on June 24, blamed on ongoing vandalism to their fiber network.
But technical difficulties alone can also cause loss of internet service, as many Reg readers will be all too aware.
On May 21, a router update gone awry led to an outage for Bell Canada customers in Ontario and Quebec. This disruption was fairly short-lived, with traffic returning to expected levels just an hour later, but traffic fell by as much as 70 percent during that time.
Customers of Lumen/CenturyLink across parts of the United States experienced a widespread Internet service disruption on June 19, lasting for a couple of hours. Cloudflare says this is likely to have been caused by a DNS issue, as it claims that users who switched their DNS resolver to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 were able to continue to access internet services.
Cloudflare reports that Russian Internet provider ASVT was targeted by a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on May 28 that led to a multi-day complete internet outage. The attack reached 70.07 Gbps or 6.92 million packets/second and lasted for approximately 10 hours, although traffic on the network remained below expected levels throughout the following week.
How did you explain that massive hours-long outage? Oh yes. You didn’t
Finally, Cloudflare lists some unexplained disruptions that occurred during the quarter.
On April 1, Telia Finland reported widespread disruption in its mobile network data connections and fixed broadband, resulting in a brief near-complete outage between 0930 and 1015 local time.
on May 7, SkyCable in the Philippines experienced a complete internet blackout, with traffic across the network dropping to zero. SkyCable did not publish any information regarding the cause of the eight-hour service crash, Cloudflare says.
Thai mobile provider TrueMove H suffered a nationwide outage on May 22, but also did not provide an official reason for this. Reports in the local press claimed it was caused by technical errors, such as an issue with the firm’s DNS servers.®