Cloudflare has outlined a wide range of events that led to internet disruptions around the world, showing that outages can come from much more than cyberattacks. Its summary includes software mistakes, damaged cables, power loss, natural disasters and even temporary shutdowns linked to government exams.
One of the most striking cases involved Germany’s .de domain space. According to the report, a routine key update caused every .de website to go offline worldwide. Cloudflare said the failure had an unusual side effect: global DNS queries increased rather than falling, suggesting users and automated systems kept trying to reach affected sites.
The company also highlighted how physical events continue to play a major role in connectivity problems. Among the incidents were a typhoon, two earthquakes and multiple power failures. Cloudflare’s roundup further noted a fiber cut and damage caused by a drone at an AWS region, underscoring how vulnerable internet infrastructure can be to both accidents and environmental conditions.
Beyond weather and hardware, the report points to human decisions and operational errors as recurring causes of downtime. It listed thirteen government exam shutdowns and referred to a botched update among the more unusual triggers. Taken together, the examples show that global internet reliability depends on software changes, electrical systems, network cables and policy choices all working at the same time.
