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Shutdowns, power outages, and conflict: a review of Q1 2026 Internet disruptions
Drone strikes physically damaged AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain in March, marking the first time active military conflict has directly hit major hyperscaler cloud infrastructure.
What: Cloudflare's Q1 2026 disruption report documents unprecedented Internet outages: Iran's shutdown starting January 8 became one of the longest in recent years (still ongoing in late April), Uganda blocked Internet January 13-26 around its election, AWS me-central-1 (UAE) and me-south-1 (Bahrain) regions were struck by drones March 1-2 causing fires and structural damage, and Cuba's national power grid collapsed three separate times in March (March 4, 16, 21-22).
Why it matters: The convergence of infrastructure as both political target and military objective is accelerating—governments now routinely weaponize Internet shutdowns during elections (Uganda, Republic of Congo), and physical conflict is reaching cloud infrastructure for the first time. Power grid fragility (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Paraguay) shows how deeply Internet resilience depends on legacy electrical infrastructure.
Takeaway: If you use AWS me-central-1 (UAE) or me-south-1 (Bahrain) regions, AWS recommends backing up data or migrating to other regions due to continued regional instability.
Deep dive
- Government-directed shutdowns dominated Q1 2026: Uganda blocked Internet January 13-26 during presidential election (dropping from 72 Gbps to 1 Gbps at UIXP), Iran started a shutdown January 8 that remained in effect through late April via aggressive filtering with whitelists and white SIM cards, and Republic of Congo went dark for 60 hours during March 15 election
- Iran's shutdown began with withdrawal of 4.46M IPv6 /48-equivalents from Asiatech (AS43754) hours before traffic dropped, suggesting route manipulation as precursor, but the shutdown itself was implemented via filtering not route withdrawal
- AWS data centers physically attacked: drones struck two UAE facilities (me-central-1) and one Bahrain facility (me-south-1) on March 1-2, causing fires and structural damage, with AWS warning Middle East operations would remain "unpredictable" and urging customers to migrate; connection failure rates spiked and remained elevated for days
- Power outages caused cascading Internet failures across multiple countries: Moldova and Ukraine hit by 750kV line failure January 31, Paraguay lost 72% of traffic for 3 hours February 18, Dominican Republic's SENI grid failure February 23 caused traffic to drop sharply for 13+ hours
- Cuba's electrical grid collapsed three times in March alone (4th, 16th, 21st-22nd), each causing 50-77% drops in Internet traffic lasting 12-30+ hours, reflecting severe infrastructure deterioration following similar failures in September 2025, March 2025, and October 2024
- Military strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure caused 50% traffic drops in Dnipropetrovsk (January 7-8) and Kharkiv (January 26)
- Storm Kristin knocked out power for 850K customers in Portugal January 28, with Leiria region seeing 70% traffic drop and over 6,000 customers still without power three weeks later
- WACS submarine cable incident disrupted Republic of Congo Internet January 2-4, dropping traffic 82% until repairs completed
- Verizon Wireless experienced software issue affecting voice and data across US January 14, resolved by 22:15 ET
- Routing-related incidents: Orange Guinée (AS37461) had 4-hour outage January 6, Flow Grenada (AS46650) completely lost IPv4 announcements during 12-hour outage February 9-10, TalkTalk (AS13285) in UK lost 50% traffic for ~75 minutes March 25
Decoder
- Whitelisting/White SIM cards: Filtering technique where only approved websites and specific SIM cards (issued to government/select users) can access the Internet, used by Iran to maintain near-total shutdown while allowing select users online—more granular than route-based blocking
- /48-equivalent: Unit for measuring IPv6 address space; one /48 block contains 2^80 addresses (1.2 septillion), used to quantify the 4.46 million /48-equivalents withdrawn by Asiatech during Iran's shutdown
- BGP announcements: Border Gateway Protocol updates that advertise which networks can reach which IP addresses; spikes in announcements or complete withdrawals indicate routing instability or networks going offline
Original article
The first quarter of 2026 saw widespread global Internet disruptions driven by government shutdowns, military conflict, power grid failures, severe weather, cable damage, and technical incidents, with major outages in countries like Iran, Uganda, and Cuba highlighting political control and infrastructure fragility. Additional impacts included cloud infrastructure damage in the Middle East, regional power-related outages across multiple nations, and shorter provider-specific failures in the US, Europe, and Africa.
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