Cloudflare logged 49 internet outages in Q3, and 18 were Iraq's exam-day shutdowns

Cloudflare Radar recorded 49 internet disruptions worldwide between July and September 2026, and more than a third of them came from one recurring source: Iraq switching off connectivity during national exams. The company's quarterly review, published October 27, counts 18 such shutdowns out of 19 government-directed ones.

Power failures were the next biggest cause with 14 incidents in 10 countries, followed by five natural disasters. Most outages were short: 14 recovered in under an hour and 16 in under three hours.

Iraq's shutdowns run on a timetable

The Iraqi shutdowns followed a fixed window starting at 03:30 UTC and lasted roughly 15 to 90 minutes each. Three happened in early July, and most fell between August 26 and September 28.

Cloudflare cites Internet Society Pulse reporting that Iraq's communications minister, Mustafa Sanad, confirmed the shutdowns and promised a digital system that would remove the need for centralized exam distribution, and with it the need to cut the internet on exam days. Syria and Sudan, which have used the same tactic in past years, recorded no exam shutdowns this quarter, though Cloudflare thinks that reflects exam calendars rather than a policy change.

One building in Honduras took the country down

The most telling outage was in Honduras. On September 10, a power failure at a single interconnection facility knocked out at least 11 major providers for about three hours, and national HTTP traffic fell 63%.

Two networks rode it out: Telecomunicaciones de Guatemala, a cross-border provider, and the mobile carrier Celtel. Cloudflare's reading is that their Honduran traffic probably leans on infrastructure outside the country, which is exactly what kept them away from the failed exchange point.

Cuba showed the opposite problem, an unreliable grid rather than one weak point. Radar saw four power-related outages there, on July 6, July 14, August 3 and across three straight days without power from September 18 to 20, with traffic drops ranging from 18% to 59%.

Cooling, typhoons and earthquakes

Not every failure was in a fragile region. In Phoenix on August 13, a broken cooling system at a data center pushed traffic from the domain registrar Namecheap close to zero, which Cloudflare flags as a growing risk as cooling becomes more critical.

Guam lost connectivity to a second super typhoon in under three months. After Super Typhoon Bavi, only about 25% of the island's distribution feeders were online at one point, according to the Guam Power Authority. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia in August caused a disruption lasting four and a half days, while a magnitude 7.1 quake in Kumamoto, Japan, mostly hit desktop traffic and left mobile traffic largely untouched.

In Ethiopia, a government-directed shutdown in the Tigray region lasted 10 days, with traffic there falling 100% and national traffic down by up to 30%. Whether Iraq's promised exam system arrives before the next exam season is the thing to watch in Cloudflare's next report.