Why the internet kept breaking and taking down your favorite sites in 2025

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Physical internet infrastructure problems became more common.
• Good old network foul-ups also contributed to failures.
• The internet is bigger, faster, and more fragile than ever.

You may have noticed there were many internet disruptions last year. It wasn't your imagination. We saw Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and perhaps 2025's most damaging disruption of all, October's AWS collapse. 

Also: The internet: Bigger, more fragile than ever - and 'fundamentally rewired' by AI

However, there were far more issues that you may have missed. 

Cloudflare's latest internet disruptions report shows a global network that's still fragile in the face of storms, cable cuts, and cloud glitches, but somewhat less prone to government‑ordered shutdowns than it was earlier in the decade.

Worldwide internet disruptions

Altogether, Cloudflare reported in its 2025 fourth quarter analysis that it observed more than 180 internet disruptions worldwide over the course of 2025, ranging from short, localized incidents to multiday nationwide outages.

The most dramatic outages involved physical infrastructure failures, especially submarine cables and national power grids. For example, in Haiti, Digicel suffered two separate international fiber cuts in October and November, pushing traffic on its network close to zero during one incident and triggering multi‑hour outages until repairs were completed.

Power problems drove country‑scale disruptions in the Dominican Republic and Kenya. For the Caribbean country, transmission line failure on Nov. 11 knocked out electricity and cut internet traffic by nearly 50% until the grid was mostly restored around 2:20 a.m. the following day. Later, a Kenya‑Uganda interconnection issue triggered a Kenyan blackout on Dec. 9, which depressed national traffic by up to 18% for nearly four hours. 

Also: Slow home internet? Here are 3 things I always check first to regain fast Wi-Fi speeds

Disruption isn't just a global south problem. With more frequent extreme weather from climate change and record power loads from AI-heavy data centers, electrical grid operators fear the US will experience simultaneous power and internet outages in the coming years. 

The war in Ukraine remained evident in Cloudflare's traffic graphs. A Russian drone strike in Odessa, Ukraine, for instance, cut internet throughput by 57%. With increased international instability, we're all too likely to see more network failures from attacks. 

What really caused the outages

The top reason for internet outages last year was technical failures. 

Of, course, an experienced network administrator will suspect that Domain Name System (DNS) problems caused most of these issues. For example, Italy's Fastweb's DNS resolution issue on Oct. 22 knocked traffic down by more than 75% for wired customers. 

AWS's major failure was due to a DNS problem. As the tech support saying goes: "It's always DNS."

Also: Mesh routers vs. Wi-Fi routers: What is best for your home office?

Cloudflare used the report to spotlight its new Radar Cloud Observatory, which tracks availability and performance issues across four of the major cloud platforms: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud at a regional level. With so many of us now depending on cloud services every day, failures here mean we're out of work even if our local network connection is fine and dandy. 

Cloudflare also recognized that it contributed to the 2025 fourth quarter disruption tally with two of its own outages. 

A Nov. 18 incident stemmed from a software failure triggered by a database system permissions change that fouled up a feature file used by its Bot Management service. Later, on Dec. 5, an event affected about 28% of all HTTP traffic on its network after changes to request body parsing logic introduced problems during a rush to mitigate a newly disclosed React Server Components vulnerability.

Before the internet, there was the ARPANet, a packet-switching network designed to keep network traffic going even in the event of a nuclear war. For many years, you could count on the internet to stay up, no matter what. As the internet's most important sites and services have become more centralized, that's no longer true. 

The internet is certainly bigger and faster than ever. But it's also more fragile.