Iran saw the most internet downtime in the last quarter as government-directed shutdowns defined Cloudflare’s latest report on internet disruptions.

Cloudflare's report found that Iranian citizens have spent a large part of this year offline or with severely limited connectivity due to nationwide internet shutdowns as a result of turmoil in the nation. January saw Iran witness a near-total internet shutdown imposed by the government in an effort to curb escalating anti-regime protests.

On January 8, Cloudflare recorded a near-complete loss of announced IPv6 address space several hours before the first drop in traffic took place, detailing losses to AS43754 (Asiatech) and AS31549 (Rasana), autonomous systems (ASNs) belonging to Iranian internet providers. The former was described as the single largest contributor, losing 4.46 million/48-equivalents, accounting for around 9.4% of Iran's entire IPv6 space loss on its own.

“Given the gap in timing between this change and the loss of traffic across the country, this may have been a leading indicator of what was about to happen, but likely not a direct cause of it,” Cloudflare's report reads. “Some nominal shifts in announced IPv4 address space are visible during the shutdown, but levels remained fairly consistent during the shutdown period. These observations suggest that the shutdown was implemented by other means, such as filtering.”

Cloudflare then detailed events on February 28, when a second nationwide internet shutdown began as military strikes escalated in Iran. The web giant observed a sharp drop in traffic from Iran beginning around 10:30 local time (07:00 UTC), falling to well under 1% of previous levels, with only minimal amounts of web and DNS traffic egressing the country. The report added no significant shifts in announced IP address space were observed around the onset of this shutdown; IPv4 space “remained fairly consistent, and IPv6 space remained consistently volatile,” implying that route withdrawals were not the cause.

Instead, Cloudflare suggested the shutdown was effectively achieved through aggressive filtering, using “whitelists” and “white SIM cards” to limit access to approved websites for a select group of users.

The shutdown remains ongoing, with Cloudflare declaring it one of the longest sustained internet blackouts observed in recent years.

Outages beyond Iran

Uganda also saw “weaponized blackouts” in the last quarter. Despite promises that there would not be a repeat of an internet shutdown that occurred around Uganda’s 2021 elections, Ugandan authorities ordered mobile network operators to suspend public internet access on January 13.

Domestic traffic at the Uganda Internet Exchange Point (UIXP) dropped from approximately 72 Gb/s to 1 Gb/s as a result, with traffic remaining effectively at zero through January 17.

Internet connectivity was partially reinstated after incumbent President Yoweri Museveni was announced as the winner of his seventh term. The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) had reportedly defended the shutdown as necessary to "curb misinformation, disinformation, electoral fraud, and related risks."

Military action also defined the quarter, with continued disruption in Ukraine, while war in the Middle East impacted hyperscaler cloud infrastructure.

Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure on January 7-8 caused power outages that disrupted internet connectivity in Dnipropetrovsk and surrounding regions. Cloudflare’s Radar observability platform recorded a significant drop in traffic from the region, reaching nearly half of the prior week’s levels. A similar drop was seen on January 26, when Russia launched a drone and missile attack targeting energy infrastructure in Kharkiv.

Following U.S. military action in Iran, three Amazon data centers were damaged by Iranian drone strikes in the Middle East. Cloudflare's Cloud Observatory data showed elevated connection failure rates for the United Arab Emirates (me-central-1) and Bahrain (me-south-1) regions beginning March 1-2, and remaining higher for multiple days. The latter saw further disruption in late March following further drone activity.

In Cloudflare's last report, Tanzania saw traffic drop to near zero nationwide after its government enforced a full shutdown in October last year.

Cloudflare's latest research observed “a stark contrast to the lack of observed government-directed shutdowns in the same quarter a year prior,” showing the web is under threat once again from geopolitical forces.