Internet Outage Statistics 2026: Frequency, Cost and Causes

Cloudflare detected 174 major internet outages worldwide in 2025, an average of more than three significant disruptions every week. Uptime survey data shows that more than half (54%) of organizations had a recent outage that cost more than $100,000. The data below covers outage frequency, cost, cause breakdowns, regional vulnerability, and ISP and CDN reliability.

Key Takeaways

• Cloudflare detected 174 major internet outages globally in 2025.
• 54% of significant outages cost organizations more than $100,000, according to Uptime.
• 41% of enterprises report hourly downtime costs above $1 million, per ITIC.
• 50% of data centres had at least one impactful outage over the past three years, down from 53% in 2024.
• Government-imposed shutdowns reached 120,095 hours globally in 2025, a 70% rise on the previous year.
• U.S.-centric outages peaked at 55% between January 27 and February 16, 2025, before settling at 39% by the end of June.
• Power remains the leading cause; IT and networking issues totalled 23% of impactful outages in 2024.

Editor’s Choice

• Cloudflare logged 174 major outages worldwide in 2025.
• Government shutdowns cost the world economy $19.7 billion in 2025.
• Russia’s shutdowns alone cost $11.9 billion, per Top10VPN’s tally of NetBlocks data.
• CrowdStrike’s defective Falcon update affected more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
• AWS’s October 20, 2025, outage hit 113 services for more than 15 hours.
• Red Sea cable cut on September 6, 2025, disrupted nearly 25% of internet traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
• Azure Front Door’s October 29, 2025, incident lasted about 9 hours.

Recent Developments

• December 30: A major technical failure at Israeli provider Partner Communications disrupted mobile, TV, and Internet services across the country.
• December 12: Attacks on Ukraine damaged warehouses and energy infrastructure, with traffic dropping by as much as 57%.
• October 29, 2025: An Azure Front Door configuration change disrupted Office 365, Teams, Xbox Live, and Alaska Airlines for about 9 hours.
• October 20, 2025: An AWS DynamoDB DNS defect cascaded to 113 services for more than 15 hours.
• September 6, 2025: SMW4 and IMEWE submarine cables were cut in the Red Sea, degrading nearly 25% of intercontinental traffic.
• March 4, 2025: The PEACE submarine cable was cut approximately 1,450 km from Zafarana, Egypt, with physical repairs expected to take weeks or months.

Internet Outage Frequency

• Cloudflare’s monitoring detected 174 major internet outages across the globe throughout 2025.
• That cadence translates to an average of more than three significant connectivity disruptions weekly.
• U.S.-centric outages peaked at 55% from January 27 to February 16, 2025, per ThousandEyes.
• By early March 2025, the U.S.-centric share had dropped to 46%, then 41% by early April.
• U.S.-centric outages reached as low as 24% during certain periods in May 2025 before settling at 39% by the end of June.
• Uptime data shows 50% of data centres had at least one impactful outage over the past three years, down from 53% in 2024.
• For the fourth consecutive year, Uptime Intelligence research suggests that overall outage frequency and reported severity continue to decline.
• The two trendlines diverge: Facility-level outage frequency falls while internet-topology outage detection climbs. SQ Magazine reads this as failure migrating up the stack, from data-centre power to DNS, BGP, and CDN edges.

Source: Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review, ThousandEyes, Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2025

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The Economic Cost of Internet Outages

• More than 90% of midsize and large enterprises report that a single hour of downtime costs their organization more than $300,000, per ITIC’s 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey.
• 41% of enterprises report hourly downtime costs exceed $1 million, with over 90% of midsize and large enterprises seeing more than $300,000 per ITIC.
• Uptime survey data shows 54% of organizations had a most recent significant, serious or severe outage that cost more than $100,000.
• One in five organizations said their most recent outage cost more than $1 million, per Uptime.
• Micro SMBs with fewer than 25 employees see costs estimated at $1,670 per minute, or about $100,000 an hour.
• 57% of small businesses with 20-100 employees report downtime costs exceeding $100,000 per hour, with an average cost between $8,000 and $25,000 per hour.
• Fortune 500 companies lost as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit during the CrowdStrike outage.

Source: ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey, Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2025

Across SQ Magazine’s cybersecurity statistics coverage, breach costs and downtime costs have tracked similar widening patterns. The hourly numbers reset purchasing arguments for redundancy, multi-region cloud, and rehearsed failover.

Data Centre Outage Statistics (Uptime Institute)

• 50% of data centres experienced at least one impactful outage over the past three years, down from 53% in 2024, per Uptime.
• Outages from IT and networking issues totalled 23% of impactful outages in 2024.
• Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, per Uptime.
• Over the nine years Uptime has tracked publicly reported outages, third-party IT and data centre service providers have accounted for about two-thirds of those reported.
• The failure of staff to follow procedures has become an even greater cause of outages than in the previous year, per Uptime.
• Rising demand for AI is straining power and cooling, with growing power-stability challenges from aging grid infrastructure and intermittent renewable energy.
• For the fourth consecutive year, overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline.

Cloud Outage Statistics (AWS, Azure)

• On October 20, 2025, AWS experienced one of its most severe regional outages in years.
• An AWS DynamoDB update containing a critical defect triggered cascading failures that affected 113 different AWS services for more than 15 hours.
• Affected platforms during the AWS event included Snapchat, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox, Reddit, Venmo, Disney+, Canva, and Amazon retail’s own support and retail systems.
• On October 29, 2025, around noon Eastern time, an unintentional configuration change within Azure Front Door triggered an outage that lasted about 9 hours.
• The disruption impacted Office 365, Minecraft, Xbox Live, Outlook, Teams, Power Apps, Costco, Starbucks, and Alaska Airlines.
• Without DNS, AWS services could not locate their critical paired infrastructure, creating a gradual collapse during the October 20, 2025, incident.

Source: AWS Health Dashboard summaries, Microsoft Azure post-incident review (via IncidentHub aggregation)

For data on cloud-adjacent risk, see SQ Magazine’s API breach statistics.

Causes of Internet Outages

• Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, per Uptime.
• IT and networking issues totalled 23% of impactful outages in 2024, per Uptime.
• Staff failure to follow procedures became an even greater cause of outages than the previous year.
• Analysis of H1 2025 outages shows an increasing prevalence of subtle functional failures and service degradations where symptoms often appear disconnected from their root causes.
• Anchor drag accounts for roughly 30% of global cable faults annually, per the International Cable Protection Committee analysis cited after the September 2025 Red Sea cuts.
• Cable cuts affecting both submarine and domestic fibre optic infrastructure caused service disruptions lasting from several hours to several days.
• Rising demand for AI is straining power and cooling, with aging grid infrastructure compounding the risk.

Source: Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2025, ThousandEyes, International Cable Protection Committee

Submarine Cable Cut Outages

• Submarine cables SMW4 and IMEWE were cut in the Red Sea on September 6, 2025, disrupting internet services across Asia and the Middle East.
• The cuts disrupted nearly 25% of internet traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
• SMW4 is operated by Tata Communications; IMEWE is managed by an Alcatel-Lucent consortium.
• The cuts resulted in degraded internet performance in India, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
• The PEACE submarine cable was cut in the Red Sea approximately 1,450 km from Zafarana, Egypt, on March 4, 2025, disrupting internet traffic between Asia, East Africa, and Europe.
• Although cloud services were quickly restored after the PEACE cut, physical cable repairs are expected to take weeks or months.
• The International Cable Protection Committee’s early analysis points to commercial shipping activity as the probable cause of the September 6, 2025, cuts, likely a vessel dragging its anchor across the cables.

Source: NBC News, Cloudflare Radar, International Cable Protection Committee

Government-Imposed Internet Shutdowns

• Government-imposed internet shutdowns cost the world economy $19.7 billion in 2025, per Top10VPN’s tally based on NetBlocks data.
• There were 212 major government-imposed internet outages across 28 countries in 2025, the highest number recorded in a single year.
• Disruptions included 120,095 hours of internet shutdown, a 70% rise from the previous year.
• Government-mandated shutdowns occurred in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Panama during Q2 2025, each tied to politically sensitive events.
• Several 2025 outages were related to internet shutdowns intended to prevent cheating on academic exams, with countries including Sudan implementing regular multi-hour shutdowns over several weeks.
• Russia led with 57 shutdowns, while Myanmar and Equatorial Guinea each experienced shutdowns lasting the full year.

Source: Top10VPN Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2025, NetBlocks COST methodology

Cost of Government Shutdowns by Country

• Russia bore the largest 2025 shutdown cost at $11.9 billion, per Top10VPN’s NetBlocks-based estimate.
• Venezuela incurred $1.91 billion in 2025 shutdown costs.
• Myanmar followed at $1.89 billion, with shutdowns spanning the full year.
• Russia accounted for 57 shutdowns in 2025, the highest single-country count.
• Myanmar and Equatorial Guinea each experienced shutdowns lasting the full year of 2025.

Most-Restricted Platforms During Outages

• X (Twitter) topped the platform-block list with 18,354 hours blocked across 2025.
• Telegram was second with 16,990 hours blocked.
• TikTok placed third with 14,646 hours blocked.
• The top three blocked platforms together accounted for 49,990 hours of restriction in 2025, equivalent to nearly six years of continuous block time.
• The report draws on NetBlocks real-time data and reports, IODA, and the SFLC.IN Internet Shutdown Tracker, and OONI’s censorship measurement tools.

Major Single-Incident Outages (CrowdStrike)

• The defective software upgrade in CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform led to outages affecting more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
• Fortune 500 companies lost as much as $5.4 billion in revenues and gross profit.
• The healthcare sector recorded an estimated $1.94 billion in losses, the largest sector-level hit.
• The banking sector recorded an estimated $1.15 billion in losses.
• Fortune 500 airlines such as American and United lost a collective $860 million.

Regional Outage Vulnerability

• U.S.-centric outages fluctuated from 24% to 55% during the first half of 2025, per ThousandEyes.
• A massive power outage impacting Spain and Portugal disrupted connectivity within those countries in Q2 2025.
• Attacks on Ukraine on December 12 damaged warehouses and energy infrastructure, with traffic dropping by as much as 57%.
• East Africa was repeatedly impacted by submarine cable cuts during 2025, exposing route-diversity gaps.
• India, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates saw degraded performance after the September 6, 2025, Red Sea cuts.
• On December 30, Israeli provider Partner Communications experienced a country-wide failure spanning mobile, TV, and Internet services.

Source: ThousandEyes, Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review, NBC News

ISP and Telecom Outage Reporting (FCC NORS)

• The FCC established outage reporting rules in 2004, per the agency’s NORS overview.
• Qualifying providers must report network outages that last at least 30 minutes and meet specific thresholds in NORS.
• Wireline, cable, satellite, wireless, and Signalling System 7 providers must submit a NORS notification within 120 minutes with preliminary information.
• Providers must follow up with an initial outage report within three calendar days, and a final report no later than 30 days after discovering the outage.
• Effective April 15, 2025, service providers also comply with the FCC’s updated reporting requirements for outages that impact 911 and 988 service.

Source: Federal Communications Commission Network Outage Reporting System

Outage Patterns: Functional Failures and Degradations

• Analysis of the first half of 2025 found an increasing prevalence of subtle functional failures and service degradations.
• Symptoms in 2025 outages often appear disconnected from their root causes.
• On October 20, 2025, an AWS DynamoDB update defect cascaded into DNS failure across 113 different AWS services.
• On October 29, 2025, an unintentional configuration change within Azure Front Door rippled outward for about 9 hours.
• SQ Magazine’s reading of the Cisco data is that operators face a detection problem more than a redundancy problem: Many 2025 incidents bypassed traditional uptime monitors because services responded slowly rather than failing outright.

Source: ThousandEyes Three Outage Patterns 2025, post-incident summaries

What Internet Outage Data Means for Businesses

• More than 90% of midsize and large enterprises now report that a single hour of downtime costs more than $300,000, per ITIC.
• 41% of enterprises report hourly downtime costs above $1 million, per ITIC.
• Two-thirds of publicly reported outages traced back to third-party IT and data centre service providers, per Uptime’s nine-year tracking.
• Small businesses with 20-100 employees face an average hourly cost between $8,000 and $25,000.
• Resilience planning that ignores third-party concentration risk leaves the largest exposure unaddressed. SMBs should weigh provider diversity alongside pure uptime SLAs.

Source: ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey, Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2025

For the SMB-specific operational risk context, see SQ Magazine’s small business breach statistics.

Workforce-side implications appear in our cybersecurity workforce data breakdown.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Cloudflare logged 174 major internet outages in 2025. Uptime survey data shows one in five organizations now sees their most recent outage cost more than $1 million. ITIC pegs hourly downtime above $1 million for 41% of enterprises. The cost surface widens at both ends of the stack, from data-centre power events to topology-level cascades like the AWS DynamoDB and Azure Front Door incidents.

Two patterns frame the year ahead. First, deliberate shutdowns now overshadow accidental outages by total economic cost, with Russia’s $11.9 billion alone exceeding many natural-cause categories. Second, failure is migrating up the stack: facility-level outages are declining, but DNS, BGP, and submarine cable events are taking their place. Operations leaders, regulators, and SMB owners benefit when planning treats both tracks as first-order risks rather than aggregating them under a single uptime SLA. SQ Magazine will continue tracking these signals as quarterly Cloudflare Radar reports and the Uptime Institute’s next annual analysis arrive.