Originally aired on January 30 @ 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM EST
In this episode, David Belson — Cloudflare’s Head of Data Insights — joins us to walk through the biggest Internet disruptions of late 2025 and early 2026.
At the start, we also highlight several new posts on the Cloudflare Blog: Moltworker, a self-hosted personal AI agent built with OpenClaw (former MoltBot and ClawdBot) and Cloudflare’s Developer Platform; Post-Quantum Matrix Homeserver, a proof-of-concept encrypted messaging server running entirely on Cloudflare Workers; Route Leak Incident (Jan 22), what happened in Miami and how routing policy safeguards are being improved; Google’s AI Advantage, why crawler separation is needed for fair competition and better protection for publishers.
We then go into the major Internet trends, including the storm-related disruption in three regions in Portugal this week. Our main focus is the government-directed nationwide shutdown in Iran.
Then we also go over Q4 2025 disruptions: repeated weather-driven outages across Africa and the Caribbean, submarine cable failures, DNS anomalies, and the persistent risk of centralized points of failure. David also explains how Starlink’s global footprint is reshaping Radar visibility — and why the Internet remains remarkably resilient despite a turbulent quarter.
Mentioned blog posts:
Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in NET. It's January 30th, 2026 edition. This week we're talking about Internet disruptions with a focus on the multi-week government imposed shutdown in Iran.
The situation there is really difficult with serious humanitarian consequences and the Internet shutdown only adds to this troubling reality.
Also, it's worth mentioning in our blog this week we had a very cool blog related to something that many are talking in the industry, in the tech sector.
It's a self-host personal AI agent, so it's all about having a real AI personal assistant working for you.
Initially this project was called Clawed Bot, then it changed its name this week on Tuesday to Mold Bot and now because the creator of this project that is based in Austria didn't like the change that he did for Mold Bot, now this Friday is already a different name.
It's Open Claw. So now it's Open Claw, but this blog post explains how we're introducing what we call Mold Worker.
Mold Worker is a middleware worker and adapted scripts that allows running this Open Claw on Clawthor's sandbox SDK and our developer platform APIs.
So you can self-host your AI personal assistant without any new hardware.
So Apple minis have been really popular because of this AI personal assistant.
This means you don't need a new hardware to run your AI personal assistant and even DPS as well.
We also had earlier this week a blog post about a proof of concept really about how we build a matrix home server to Clawthor workers, so also a blog about developers.
So it's all about delivering encrypted messaging at the edge with automatic post quantum cryptography.
And also really as usual popular blog post because it was about an incident that Clawthor had and we're really transparent on these.
So it's route leak incident on January 22nd. An automated routing policy configuration error causes to leak some border gateway protocol prefixes unintentionally.
So that's BGP prefixes from a router at our Miami data center. So we discussed the impacts and the changes we are implementing as a result.
Of course being transparent is really part of the culture.
It also brings us a lot of attention.
People really like to read these technical blogs usually and that's because we share actual data, actual information with industry for others also to improve and be more resilient.
This Friday is coming out, so when you're watching this it's already came out, a blog post about Google's AI advantage and why crawler separation is the only path to a fair Internet.
This is all about a new proposal from the UK about new rules to give publishers more control over how Google uses their content in generative AI.
But the measures from Clawthor's perspective still fall short.
So a stronger separation between Google's search crawler and its AI systems is needed to ensure real transparency, fair competition and better protection for the creative sector.
That's something that Clawthor defends in this situation.
The UK proposal is already a good step there to that purpose, but we actually defend a bit more protection there and better separations.
So without further ado, here's my conversation about Internet disruptions with my colleague David Belson.
I'm your host, Ron Tomei, based in Lisbon, Portugal, a very rainy and stormy Lisbon, Portugal.
And with me, I have returning to the show, David Belson, our head of Data Insights and my colleague in the Radar team based in the Boston area in the US.
How are you, David? Where it is not raining, it is really cold and lots of snow.
Oh, no, it's not snowing. It's not actively snowing at the moment, but this weekend, again, we're supposed to get more snow around.
And we had a clear, a big storm this week here in, not only in Lisbon, in Portugal, there was actually two regions in Portugal that were more affected.
That was Leiria and Santarém, but also Coimbra. So actually three regions, but two were more affected.
And this was, the storm was in the early morning of Tuesday to Wednesday.
And by 4 p.m., there was like a clear power, but also Internet disruption.
And we saw traffic going down as much as 70% in Leiria and close to 60% in the other two, Coimbra and Santarém.
Probably do remix, I assume, of power outages and some infrastructure damage as well.
Yeah, there was a lot of both.
And currently, we're recording this on Thursday. It's still ongoing in Leiria.
So over 24 hours of disruption in terms of power outages, but also Internet outages.
I believe there was 1 million households at the beginning of the power outage that were affected.
So a clear impact here. Yeah, those often take a long time to resolve.
Thankfully, I think we had some of the snow I was referencing was from a storm last weekend that moved across the midsection of the country and up into the East Coast.
And there was a lot of ice and a lot of snow across a lot of states.
But keeping an eye on the connectivity and the traffic levels from those states, we didn't really see any significant impacts.
So definitely power outages, there's definitely some infrastructure damage, but I guess it wasn't quite as widespread enough to really register, at least as unusual and anomalous in our traffic graphs.
True. And we're not accustomed to these types of storms here in Portugal.
And the winds were up to 95 miles per hour. So many infrastructure areas were impacted.
We're talking about a nor'easter or a winter nor 'easter, which is often very cold, snowy and high winds.
So it's the triple whammy. Well, let's why not go directly to the Iran situation.
That started a while ago, several weeks ago.
Three weeks ago today, yep. Exactly. What can we say about that? It was a clear shot of a very big country in terms of population, in terms of area.
That was almost close to zero for many days, right?
Yes. Yeah. So Iran has shut down the Internet in the past.
So this is not unexpected. They have a playbook, for better or for worse, on how they implement these types of shutdowns.
And they're usually pretty orderly, but it appears that in this case, it wasn't quite as orderly and it was a little more of a scattershot approach.
So ahead of the shutdown, the days ahead of January 8th, we saw some changes around advertised IPv6 address space.
Then a lot of that had disappeared. There were some shifts we observed around the share of traffic using HTTP3 and QUIC where that dropped.
So that indicated that there might've been some filtering going on, some weirdness going on there.
And then I think mid-afternoon around, I think it was around 16th or on January 8th, we saw traffic just start to drop pretty rapidly.
And if you looked at the major autonomous systems, the ISPs there, like Iran Cell and MCCI and TCI and other, Rytel and others.
Around that time, they all started seeing traffic just drop precipitously.
That was the initial part of the shutdown over the last three weeks.
Be careful with my wording here. We've seen traffic return in sort of fits and starts.
Last week, there was a little bit of an increase we saw where it was at near zero and it had grown about X.
So the traffic we were seeing was 50 times higher than it was previously in the past couple of days, but it was still super low.
That only lasted for a few hours and then went away. But this week, actually, we've seen, we saw traffic come back again late Sunday into Monday and then dropped again.
The late Sunday into Monday recovery was, at least for us, similar peak levels that we saw pre-shutdown.
And then that dropped late Monday and then picked up again on Tuesday.
And it stayed, well, I'd say elevated over the last couple of days.
So I think there is some connectivity that's come back there.
Based on what I've heard from people in the know there, there's a lot of allow listing going on, a lot of deny listing.
They're saying users can get to these domains, but not these domains.
It's slowly enabling, I think, from some of the fixed line providers.
But there's been a lot of, as the shutdown was occurring, there was a lot of talk about Starlink and how Starlink was helping keep people online, but the government was aggressively going after Starlink users, trying to find them, trying to block the signals, arresting and fining people for actually using the dishes.
So it's been quite a situation there. Absolutely, absolutely.
One of the things that surprised me is, first, it was almost close to zero shutdown for so many days.
And the impact in terms of all the country, not only communications, of course, the reason why this was done was because of the protests, the geopolitical situation there, where people are confronting the government there.
So it was to avoid the protests and react to the protests, which is common, as you said.
But the impact for shutdown, government mandate shutdown for so many days in terms of economy, in terms of the relationship between universities and the outside world, people, friends, family.
That reminds me that one of the first quote -unquote recoveries we saw was that there was about five or six, I think, university autonomous systems that we saw traffic return from a few days, I think, after the shutdown began.
But that was very, very short-lived as well.
Exactly. And it's really surprising to see how is that possible in 2026 already and the impact that has in terms of the economy of the country, even for the future.
So many days, it really has an impact. And as you were saying, we can see definitely that the return is a different return.
It's not a full, complete return.
It goes down and up. Even the shapes of the traffic graph. So like you were showing earlier, the pre -shutdown graphs are very clearly, there's a very clear pattern to them, a very clear diurnal pattern.
You can very clearly identify like, hey, this is normal, this isn't.
The graphs now over the last few days have not had such a clear pattern.
They've been much spikier. You can see the weekend there where it drops in between the first and the fifth labels.
It's a very, very, very normal pattern.
And then over the last few days here, it's sort of come back and it's gone away.
And it really hasn't been a return to a quote -unquote normal usage, even at a lower level.
And there's many sides that are blocked still.
Yes. Only a few are enabled. Of course, people on the ground are trying to have things working where they can go around some of the field.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of circumvention efforts going on.
Some successful, some not so successful.
It's quite, in a historical situation, interesting to see, but also worries us as humans in 2026 to see.
Absolutely. I mean, part of this is also enabled by all of Iran's Internet traffic or all of Iran's international Internet traffic funneling through a single provider.
So that does provide something of a choke point to enable them to implement things like this.
True.
And one of the things that we know also is regarding, I think, FilterWatch, an organization monitoring Iran's Internet traffic, also reported that services like Google, Bing, Chatbot are available only in a few areas, I think, right?
It depends.
So the Google Transparency Report site, you can look at it at a given country and see a normalized view of traffic for a given country.
Some of the Google sites have come back.
So I think News, I'm sorry, I know Google Search is available there, but I think Gmail access has not really returned yet.
Google Maps may be available.
I forget which were. They've definitely enabled or allow listed some of the Google services, but not all of them.
In terms of the monitoring of a situation like this one in Iran, what are, and you wrote a blog post specifically on this, what are the takeaways, the key takeaways we can take from this type of outage?
And as you mentioned, Iran is a country where this happens sometimes, but not for as long as this has been going on, right?
Yeah, this is decidedly unusual, certainly at a national level.
I think we've definitely seen long duration shutdowns in the past, but they've been much more localized.
And in some cases, even harder for us to see.
But at a national level, a three-week shutdown is particularly unusual.
I think that what other, I think the concern I think is that other countries look at this and say, ah, this is possible.
Ah, this is effective. But I think that it's really not effective because there are, in many cases, ways around it.
I think what needs to be promoted is the wrong word, but sort of socialized is, as you mentioned, the cost.
So, you know, for every day that continuity remains unavailable in the country, that has a real impact to business, has a real impact to their GDP.
And, you know, it has a real, you know, multi tens of millions of dollars a day cost for as long as they're the connectivity offline.
It's interesting to see in our data that currently with traffic coming back in part, but not a fully recovery, there's almost a battle between people trying to access the free Internet, but also the government trying to block them into specific sites.
There's actually a report from an Iranian news organization that, for example, explains that Iranian CEOs are gathering in the dining hall of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce to access the Internet.
And their activity there in terms of the Internet is monitored by the government.
So there are like curses of Internet access. This reminds me in situations in Africa where people to access the Internet, they need to go to a specific town hall or area.
That's the area in the city where there's Internet.
Yeah. And in this case, there's also been talk of, I think that's what they call white SIM cards, where people who have been deemed, I don't know, worthy for lack of a better term, are given sort of special access to, you know, the mobile Internet.
You know, this is to say nothing of the work that they've been doing within the country, also on the NIN, the National Information Network, where they're attempting to create sort of their own national Internet effectively, you know, replicating a lot of the service, the chat services, social media type services, and search services, and things like that.
My understanding is that the way the shutdown was implemented, that got affected too.
So it wasn't even like they were shutting, you know, we're shutting the gate to the, you know, to the walled city, and everybody needs to just, you know, use what's inside now.
People couldn't even get to that either, apparently.
And in terms of this battle, you can also see that there's attempts to do like new blocking, like create the local Internet blocking a lot of things.
And we can see in our own metrics, differences between the uses, you mentioned IPv4 and IPv6 initially, right, there's differences, because there's definitely different things in a protocol level, we can see differences in some of the TCP tampering metrics that we have.
So, you know, prior to the shutdown, we saw this mix of what are called tampering signals.
And then as connectivity started to come back over the last few days, that makes it shifted a little bit, which could indicate a shift in tactics, where certain things were being done before, and now they're doing something slightly different.
Makes sense. Where do you see this going next?
It's still not a fully recovery Internet to Iran, where do you see this going next?
Unclear that it will ever fully recover. I think that, you know, based on things I've seen in the news, and folks, civil society publications and things like that, I don't think there's a lot of confidence that things will go back to normal, such as normal was pre-shutdown.
I think there will continue to be some amount of limitations in place, blocking, filtering, surveillance, you know, things like that.
What I hope doesn't happen is, you know, I really don't want to see other countries looking at this and taking lessons from it from the perspective of like, oh, yeah, we can do this too.
You know, the lesson that you take from this is we shouldn't do this.
It's a really bad idea. Absolutely.
And of course, as you mentioned, consequences are not only for the population, but for businesses.
There's all sorts of consequences. Education, health, finance.
Yeah, absolutely. Everything is getting impacted.
True. But in a way, also, it shows us the fragility of the Internet and how it's used when a government needs to create an impact, a specific impact on controlling their own population.
Yeah. And I mean, it's definitely the latest evolution of when governments used to take over the press or the broadcast media to control the messaging.
And now it's sort of, hey, we've got a social problem and we're going to implement a technical solution.
You know, unfortunately, a technical solution is when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
We've seen, sort of maybe even shifting to the blog post, we've seen, you know, shutdowns used as a tool in the past.
In many cases, you know, we've talked a number of times about the exam related shutdowns, which are also a bad idea, you know, because they're trying to solve a very small problem with a very large effort or not effort, but, you know, a very large action.
And that has arguably maybe less of an impact because of the timing of it.
You know, they're shutting it down between six in the morning or a couple of hours, whatever.
But still, you're taking down a communications vehicle that impacts the whole country.
Yeah, it definitely makes a difference.
We were mentioning specifically the difference and changes that there are in the country specifically, and why not show radar and the adoption and usage page for Iran here.
There's definitely, even on the browser usage.
Yeah, you can see when connectivity sort of, I don't want to use the word stabilizes, but I'll use the word stabilizes.
I think the very noisy signal that you see there between the eighth and whatever that is in the last week.
20th, yeah.
Yeah. You know, it was because there was such little connectivity that whatever we were seeing was sort of causing that noise, but it appears that connectivity has opened up or, you know, connectivity to Cloudflare, at least, has kind of become a little bit more regular, which enables us to see a pattern there that is more similar to what we saw pre-shutdown.
True. Even in the protocols, we can see definitely a difference still ongoing.
It's not still similar to the pre-shutdown moments, even on the ATP3 perspectives here and ATP1 specifically.
It also shows the browsers and the usage here that is different.
Right, right. Also in the iOS front, much different than before.
Yeah, that was something we were discussing yesterday, and that's really, you know, it's an interesting observation to see that over the last, like, week that iOS has spiked so much.
And, you know, the thought there, one potential thought there is that the folks who have been given access, you know, lean more heavily towards an iOS-using population, you know, make of that what you will.
But, you know, when pre-shutdown, when things were a little bit more normal, you know, users represented, that looks like about, you know, 10% share, and now it's a higher share, there's certainly spikiness.
So it may be the case that the folks who have been given access and allowed access are more heavily skewed towards iOS users.
That's also a trend specifically. Let's move on to Q4 2025.
As usual, you write always these Internet disruptions reports, and Q4 was busy, although Q1 2026 is also starting really busy, but...
Yeah, yeah. Q1 started off with a bang this year.
But what can you tell us in terms of the main drivers here for disruptions in Q4 2025?
So I think, I guess, sort of thankfully, there was only one government-directed shutdown that we saw, which, you know, there are some quarters, usually, like, the third quarter is usually particularly bad because we've got Iraq and Syria and others that are doing exams.
So we have these, you know, multi-day, multi-hour shutdown programs.
In this particular case, it was Tanzania around protests around the election.
This is something we actually saw in Uganda earlier this month as well, where there was a multi-day shutdown, you know.
So there was that issue. A lot of it was the usual suspects, you know, digital Haiti getting hit with cable cuts, that happens, you know, all too frequently.
There was, you know, weather, severe weather. I'm trying to think of what else we saw.
You know, it was, you know, submarine cable issues that hit African countries, African providers, power outages.
So we were discussing this earlier in Portugal, where power outages can ultimately manifest themselves in Internet traffic graphs.
Equipment falls offline, users, subscribers fall offline. That ultimately results in lower traffic volumes.
In Kenya as well. Typically, there are countries that are more, these power outages are more frequent.
We know Cuba, we know Haiti, we know… Yeah, Haiti.
Nigeria is interesting because they've had some countrywide outages.
So we didn't see one in Q4, but I do see news alerts quite frequently about, you know, another nationwide power outage in Nigeria.
And, you know, the country is completely blacked out, whatever.
And I go and look at our traffic data and I'm like, there has been no change.
So I'm trying to figure out where that sort of disconnect is.
You know, I think that the news is maybe overstating the case, but yeah, it's definitely a, so I should say this, there's often a correlation between power outages and Internet traffic.
True. And of course, military action in Ukraine.
Yeah. So they're going on now three years, four years?
I think it's going almost for four years. Yeah. Four years. I think February will be four years.
So I think this is one of the first things we worked on after I joined Cloudflare.
And yeah, so we still see Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, oftentimes knocking out or targeting power infrastructure, and that will ultimately result in drops in traffic that we can see in certain regions.
And that happened initially earlier this year as well, already in January.
Yeah, we covered one of those like last week.
These strikes are ongoing. Kharkiv more recently.
Yes, that was the one that's earlier this week. But those are frequent, and it hasn't stopped, actually.
I think in the past few months, it has increased. There was a time that it stopped a bit, and now it has been increasing again.
And it reminds us that the war is still ongoing and with a very big impact in terms of the population when it's really cold there, both in power and in the Internet, of course.
And the weather, always the case, as in Portugal more recently.
Yeah, so hurricanes and typhoons and all the really severe weather knocks out power, it knocks out infrastructure.
So the challenge, I think, and we've talked about this, is in many cases for other types of disruptions, the traffic graphs are pretty clear.
And you can say, okay, this is when the problem happened, and this is when they fixed the problem.
Here's when the cable got restored, or here's when whatever.
The challenge with things like storm-related damage is that it's hard to really pinpoint a, this is when it was definitively resolved.
So I think you and I both tend to use our best judgment in terms of saying, okay, traffic appears to have recovered to a point where the pattern is more regular, and recovered to such a point where it appears that there's likely a reasonable number of subscribers that are able to use the services again.
Makes sense.
Specifically in the weather part, for example, in the last quarter, as we were mentioning, it was Jamaica that was impacted for several days, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, and that was Cyclone Sinai, late November, causing floods and landslides, multiple-day impact as well there in several regions.
And then we also had some what is called known or unspecific technical problems.
I always try to figure out how do I title that section?
There are definitely outages and disruptions that we see where it's very clear that there's something going on.
In some cases, the provider will acknowledge that, which is great and helpful, and they'll say, yep, yep, here they said telephone, SMS, and data services are experiencing problems.
It's like, yeah, no kidding. But they never say, oh, it's because we screwed up DNS, or, oh, it's because we pushed config, or there was a cable cut, or whatever.
So in some of these cases, they say, yep, there was a problem.
In other cases, they will post a follow-up and say, yeah, there was a DNS issue, or a fire at a data center, misconfiguration, whatever it was.
So I think Vodafone was one of those where they, I believe, had acknowledged the...
Oh, no, I take that back.
I take that back. So they didn't acknowledge it, I think.
They said they didn't provide any information on social media. And then their network status checker was also unavailable, which made it hard to go look and see, okay, did they add the information there?
This was in the UK, this Vodafone UK one?
Yes, this was Vodafone UK. A few hours, not multiple days, which is usually, it's not multiple days on countries that are more dependent on the Internet, like the UK, for example.
And technical problems are usually fairly quickly resolved.
So you back out that bad config, you get that DNS server back online, or whatever the case may be.
And we saw the announced IP address space dropping for the autonomous system, Vodafone UK specifically.
Usually that's an indicator that...
They may have screwed up a routing announcement and taken themselves offline unintentionally.
That's always an indicator we can look at to see, do we have a sense of what's going on there?
For sure. Italy also had one, FastWeb in this situation.
Yeah, FastWeb. So FastWeb acknowledged the problem. They said, yeah, it's impacting wired customers.
But one of the interesting things we saw here was, I believe, if you scroll up a bit more, that we saw a spike in...
Oh, no, we didn't. Sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. So FastWeb actually did say that a DNS resolution problem caused the issues.
So it caused the drop in traffic. So in this particular case, what likely happened is that the resolver was experiencing issues.
And that means that a user or subscriber couldn't resolve the host name for a property served by Cloudflare.
So that's why we see the drop in traffic that we do.
Yeah. And this case was DNS. Yep. Was it BGP? Was it DNS? We never...
Right. And there are some cases where you have, you know, what we've seen, the provider says, oh, hey, there was a DNS issue, and we can see a corresponding jump in traffic to quad one.
So, you know, it basically tells us there's a DNS issue and that users shifted their resolver to use Cloudflare's resolver, and that sort of got them back online.
That's our public DNS resolver, what we call quad one. There was also one in Benin, specifically.
These are common also in Israel, CELCOM, specifically in partner communications.
Right. So the prior one, the one you just scrolled past in Israel, said there was a published report that said it may have been a DNS failure.
So similar to what we saw in FastWeb. And then at partner communications in Israel, I think that was the one where we saw a spike in queries to quad one.
So if we scroll up a little bit more, you'll see the traffic drop, but then you see a spike in traffic to quad one at that same time, which could indicate potentially that either users are...
It would indicate two things, I guess.
One is that, you know, users are shifting to quad one because their local resolver is broken, or that there's some issue going on where applications can't reach or can't resolve a required hostname, and they just kind of keep retrying.
So we see that occasionally in sort of the, what do you call it, the sort of the unidirectional shutdowns.
So sometimes queries can reach us, but the resulting traffic can't get back into the country or can't get back into a network.
So what we'll see in many cases is a spike in DNS traffic as social media apps and things like that try to continually try to retry because their queries are getting out, but the responses are not getting back.
It makes sense. And of course, cloud platforms and there was the AWS outage.
Right. So this is highlighting some of the stuff that's available on a new cloud observatory page that we have on Radar that we launched in October.
And here, what we're doing is leveraging the connections we're making back to these cloud providers as customer origins.
So you may host your origin infrastructure on AWS or Google or whatever.
And then when we have to go back and make a request to that origin server, there's connectivity metrics that we can, we can measure.
So things like success rates and error codes. So if you drill down into like a one, you know, you can look like AWS, US East one or something and just click on, click on one of the regions there.
Yep. So, or, or, yeah, that's fine.
So, you know, no observed outages over the last four weeks here, but what we do see, so here's pretty consistent traffic levels.
So that's one indicator that something went, went, went crazy.
If the traffic levels shift pretty consistently low error rates.
So there is, I guess, a little bit of spikiness that we've seen, not totally clear why, but again, those error rates are still fairly low.
And then looking at the connection metrics. So in terms of, you know, the number of connection failures, TCP round trip time is very consistent as is the handshake durations.
And then the, the response header received duration as well. So that's, you know, we're making a request to that server, that region, and how long does it take for us to start getting headers back?
So, you know, when any of these metrics begin to have anomalous values, we have internal, internal alerts set up and we can go sort of investigate, you know, what metrics are shifting, what, what in anything are we seeing on the status pages for these providers?
So trying to correlate our observations or problems with reported problems from the providers.
And we've seen in previous outages, as is mentioned here, how the error, errors, Yeah, so you can see the error rate grows there.
And then at the same time, we can see the connection failures to try to reach that region went up.
So you're starting to be able to correlate a lot of these metrics to say, okay, something is definitely wrong because we're seeing these metrics change in a way that indicates there's a problem.
This was in October of last year, specifically.
Yeah. And the metrics are going up in this case. Yeah, so in this case, we're basically saying, you know, it's taking longer to try to connect to the systems in this region.
Which is a good metric to show and share. There was also the Microsoft Azure impact here that we also mentioned later.
Yeah, the, the, I mean, the impact, so we don't have, you know, absolute numbers there, but you can see that the, the shifts in metric were not quite as, arguably not quite as severe as what we saw with AWS.
Of course. And Koffler also impacted here. Yep. The couple of issues we had in November and December.
Exactly. We've covered those in associated blog posts.
Exactly. Makes sense. David, regarding the Q4, it was not a lot of events, but there was a bit of different events in a sense.
What would be the key takeaway?
I think that, you know, in the face of all of it, the Internet, for the most part, still remains resilient.
Varying levels of resiliency in the different countries.
I think that resiliency, frankly, also depends on the level, I'll say the maturity of the infrastructure.
So in some cases, you know, if, if there's a lot of points of centralization, that becomes more problematic.
Things become riskier if there's, you know, a lot of exposed infrastructure.
So a lot of, you know, non -varying power lines or, or things like that, you know, certainly many countries and even parts of every country, I think some of the, some of the infrastructure is just up on poles and out in the open.
Some of it is buried.
So I think the more exposed infrastructure is more potential damage that can occur when there's a storm or, or, you know, other sorts of severe weather.
And that places Internet connectivity at greater risk. Makes sense. Before we go, I don't resist and, and I'll share our Cloudflare Radar Year in Review for 2025.
In this case, showing the Internet outages. Of course, those that are hearing in the podcast format, they won't see the image here, the, the world map here showing the outages of the year, in a sense, the main outages or disruptions.
Those are the major ones we saw through early December last year. Exactly.
And, but it's quite interesting to see that those are still ongoing and occurring.
Right. Where, where the hotspots are, you know, where, which, which regions, which countries have a number that's greater than one.
Yeah. You can definitely see where it's more frequent for sure, where the Internet is a little bit more impacted.
So maybe next year we should look at coloring that actually a little bit more using a color scale that reflects the severity of the volume, the magnitude of the, of the number.
Makes sense. Makes sense. Like a heat map where it's darker if there was more disruptions in a sense.
And the other, the other challenge with this actually as well is, is that we're starting to have some providers that are supranational.
So providers like Starlink. So the question now becomes how do we capture an issue on a provider like Starlink, which has effectively global services.
So we can, we can assign that to the U.S.
because that's where they're based. But the reality of it is that they're, they're affecting, you know, all the, all the hundreds of countries that they offer services in.
Of course, they're global. So it makes sense. Great, David. Thank you so much.
And that's a wrap. Great. Always happy to be here.