Iraq Behind 18 of 19 Government-Ordered Internet Shutdowns Last Quarter, Cloudflare Says

The report draws on data from Cloudflare Radar, the company's traffic monitoring service. It counted 49 disruptions in the third quarter. Government-directed shutdowns were the largest category with 19 incidents. Power outages caused 14 disruptions in 10 countries, and natural disasters caused five more. Cloudflare published its summary on October 27, and Intelligent CIO Middle East reported its findings for the Middle East and Africa this week.

Exam Shutdowns in Iraq

The Iraqi shutdowns were linked to national examinations. Cloudflare said each lasted between about 15 and 90 minutes and was scheduled for the early morning in UTC. Most took place between August 26 and September 28. Each cut was short, but taken together they show how repeated nationwide restrictions affect businesses and digital services that rely on constant connectivity.

The report also recorded a government-directed shutdown in Ethiopia's Tigray region that lasted 10 days and coincided with renewed fighting there. Traffic from the region fell by 100 per cent, according to Cloudflare, and Ethiopia's national HTTP traffic dropped by up to 30 per cent.

Power and Physical Infrastructure

Power failures were the second most common cause of disruption. Cloudflare listed incidents in Kenya, Eswatini, Botswana and Gabon, and said Eswatini also had planned load-shedding. Mobile base stations, routers, data centres and interconnection facilities all depend on reliable electricity, so grid problems quickly show up as network outages.

Outside the region, the report showed how much damage a single failure point can do. A power failure at an interconnection facility in Honduras on September 10 affected at least 11 major service providers and cut national HTTP traffic by 63 per cent during an outage of about three hours. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Colombia damaged fibre-optic links and caused a disruption of about four and a half days. Guam was hit by Super Typhoon Bavi less than three months after an earlier storm, Sinlaku.

Mature infrastructure was not immune. Cloudflare said a cooling system failure at a data centre in Phoenix on August 13 caused an almost total drop in traffic from the domain registrar Namecheap, and that Portugal's MEO network was disrupted after a reported cyberattack.

Why It Matters for Regional Businesses

Companies in the Middle East and Africa are moving more payments, customer services and AI workloads into the cloud. For them, the report is a reminder that connectivity depends on government policy, electricity supply and the physical network as much as on bandwidth. The report highlighted backup power, network redundancy, alternative routes and geographically spread infrastructure as ways to limit the impact. For multinational operators in the region, Iraq's scheduled exam-season shutdowns are a recurring risk they can plan around. Conflict-related outages such as the one in Tigray are harder to predict.

Cloudflare said it will keep tracking connectivity worldwide through Radar and will publish its next quarterly summary after the end of the year.