Cloudflare says a mix of natural disasters, technical breakdowns and government actions drove major internet disruptions during the second quarter. In its latest Internet Disruption Summary, the company used Cloudflare Radar traffic data to track how connectivity was affected across different regions.
The report points to storms and earthquakes as major causes of downtime, showing how severe weather and seismic events can quickly interrupt communications networks. It also highlights infrastructure failures, which remain a significant source of outages when key systems or connections stop working.
Beyond accidental disruptions, Cloudflare said some outages were the result of deliberate network shutdowns ordered by governments. These actions can cut off or sharply reduce internet access for large groups of people, adding a political dimension to the broader picture of global connectivity problems.
Taken together, the findings show that internet reliability depends on far more than the health of online services alone. Physical damage, weak infrastructure and policy decisions can all play a direct role in whether people can get online, making disruption tracking an important measure of internet resilience.
