An Internet outage or Internet blackout or Internet shutdown is the complete or partial failure of the internet services. It can occur due to censorship, cyberattacks, disasters, police or security services actions, or errors.
Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas. Countries with a less developed Internet infrastructure are more vulnerable due to small numbers of high-capacity links.
A line of research finds that the Internet with it having a "hub-like" core structure that makes it robust to random losses of nodes but also fragile to targeted attacks on key components − the highly connected nodes or "hubs".
An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt and zones, which were subsequently released to the DNS root servers. As the root servers were reloaded, they began to return failures for all domains in the and zones.
4 hours
DNS
Automation and Human Failure
InterNIC / Network Solutions
All and domains
2008
2008 submarine cable disruption
Middle East and Mediterranean Sea
Three separate incidents of major damage to submarine optical communication cables around the world occurred in 2008. The first incident caused damage involving up to five high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East from 23 January to 4 February 2008, causing internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the Middle East and India. In late February there was another outage, this time affecting a fiber optic connection between Singapore and Jakarta. On 19 December, FLAG FEA, GO-1, SEA-ME-WE 3, and SEA-ME-WE 4 were all cut.
submarine cables
Unknown
Unknown
2009
Death of Michael Jackson
United States
Shortly after the death of pop singer Michael Jackson, thousands of online media posts and users rapidly attempted results of Michael Jackson on how he died. This resulted in Google blocking Michael Jackson-related searches (after assumption that a DDoS attack was at hand), Twitter and Wikipedia crashing, and AOL Instant Messenger collapsing for 40 minutes.
Search Engines & Social Media
Multiple subjects on MJ's death results online.
Events
2011
2011 submarine cable disruption
South Asia and Middle East
Two incidents of submarine communications cables cut off on 25 December 2011. The first cut off occurred to SEA-ME-WE 3 at Suez Canal, Egypt and the second cut off occurred to i2i which took place between Chennai, India and Singapore line. Both the incidents had caused the internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the South Asia and Middle East in particular UAE.
submarine cables
Unknown
Unknown
2011
Armenia
3,000,000
A woman digging for scrap metal damaged land cables and thereby severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia.
5 hours
land cables
digging
Unknown
Full
2011
Egypt
The Internet in Egypt was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.
ISPs
government censorship
Egypt
Full
2012
2012 Syrian internet outage
Syria
On 29 November 2012 the Syrian internet was cut off from the rest of the world. The autonomous system (AS29386) of Syrian Telecommunication Establishment (STE) was cut off completely at 10:26 UTC. Five prefixes were reported to have remained up, this is why Dyn reports an outage of 92% of the country. Responsibility for the outage has somewhat speculatively been blamed on various organizations.
Unknown
Unknown
2016
Germany
Deutsche Telekom
900,000
At the end of November 2016 0.9 million routers, from Deutsche Telekom and produced by Arcadyan, were crashed due to failed TR-064 exploitation attempts by a variant of Mirai, which resulted in internet connectivity problems for the users of these devices. While TalkTalk later patched their routers, a new variant of Mirai was discovered in TalkTalk routers.
1 day
Internet routers
cyberattack
Unknown
Full
2016
Liberia
Mirai has also been used in an attack on Liberia's internet infrastructure in November 2016.
cyberattack
Unknown
Full
2016
DDoS attack on Dyn
United States
Dyn (company)
The cyberattack took place on October 21, 2016, and involved multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeting systems operated by Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn, which caused major internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was accomplished through a large number of DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses. The activities are believed to have been executed through a botnet consisting of a large number of Internet-connected devices—such as printers, IP cameras, residential gateways and baby monitors—that had been infected with the Mirai malware. With an estimated throughput of 1.2 terabits per second, the attack is, according to experts, the largest DDoS attack on record.
1 day
Domain Name System (DNS) provider
cyberattack
Unknown
Major websites
2017
Cameroon
South-West and North-West of Cameroon
20% of the country's population
On January 17, around 20 percent of the people in Cameroon had their internet blocked due to recent anti-government protests.
270 days or 8 months
government censorship
Cameroon
Full
2017
North Korea
On October 1, The autonomous system (AS131279) of Star JV was cut off completely, due to alleged US cyber attack
9 hours and 31 minutes
cyberattack
United States
Full
2019
Zimbabwe Internet Shutdown
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwean Citizens
Majority of the country's population
On 18 January, many parts of Zimbabwe faced an internet outage due to a national shutdown in response to rioting. This was intended to prevent protesters from collaborating and planning further incidents. Initially, it was targeting specific services - VPNs, Social Media etc. -until a point where a full shutdown was implemented at which point only Cellular services would work - without internet access.
Several days
Zimbabwe Government
Partial/Full
2019
Verizon and BGP Optimizer
United States
Verizon (company)
On June 24, 2019, many parts of the Internet faced an unprecedented outage as Verizon, the popular internet transit provider accidentally rerouted IP packets after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, US. According to The Register, systems around the planet were automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going through DQE and Allegheny, which buckled under the strain, causing traffic to disappear into a black hole.
3 hours
Internet transit provider
misconfiguration
Unknown
Major websites
2019
Iranian internet shutdown
Iran
The Internet in Iran was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 96% of networks were without access in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.
7 days
ISPs
government censorship
Iran
Full
2019
Internet shutdown in India
India
50,000,000
The Government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 which caused huge controversy and mass protest in various parts of India. In order to prevent protests and outrage on social media, various state governments including those of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh decided to shut down internet access.
Up to 9 days Over one year (Kashmir)
government censorship
Various State governments of India
Full
2019
2019 Burmese internet shutdown
Myanmar
On June 21, the Internet in Burma was shut down by the government. The Burmese government shut down the internet connection in nine townships of the northern Arakan State and one single township in the Southern Chin State, which was proposed by Burmese Military officers. The shutdown is ongoing, and has become the world's longest internet shutdown.[citation needed]
government censorship
Burma
Full
2019
2019 Papua protests
Indonesia
To curb the escalating protests that occurred in the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, Indonesian authorities imposed an internet blackout on both provinces on 21 August 2019. The blackout continued until the authority partially lifted the blackout on 4 September in several regions, with complete lifting of the restriction only occurring on 9 September.
19 days
government censorship
Indonesia
Full
2019
Amhara Region coup attempt
Ethiopia
government censorship
Ethiopia
2020
Tigray war
Ethiopia
government censorship
Ethiopia
2021
North Korea
On October 21, North Korean internet infrastructure dropped off the internet, including public facing websites and email servers. All servers which were subject to monitoring were found to be offline.
At least 14 minutes
Unknown
Unknown
2021
Facebook outage
Worldwide
LAN Internet Connection
2,850,000,000
On October 4, 2021, at around 11:45 AM EST, the online social media site Facebook went down, as well as Facebook subsidiaries including Instagram and WhatsApp. Around 4:00 PM EST, people reported other sites were not working via Downdetector, including Gmail and Twitter, the latter possibly caused by Facebook users reporting the outage. The outage came less than a day after a whistleblower had been on 60 Minutes. For a short period of time, no Facebook employee could access the building to investigate the issue due to their "keycards not working.". At around 6:30 PM EST, Facebook reported that all their sites were up. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost around $7B dollars after the outage. For more info, see 2021 Facebook outage
7 hours
LAN connection
BGP Withdrawal of IP Address (Facebook), Server overwhelming (other sites)
Unknown
Major websites
2022
2022 Kazakhstan internet shutdown
Kazakhstan
On 4 January 2022 the Internet in Kazakhstan was shut down on account of anti-government protests against sudden energy price rises.
5 days
government censorship
Kazakhstan
mobile internet
2022
Rogers outage
Canada
On July 8, 2022, Rogers reported the largest outage in Canadian history. The outage affected both cable Internet and cellular networks, as well as critical infrastructure that used them, including Interac debit payments, hospitals, banks, and 9-1-1 access. The outage occurred during an update to the company's core IP network that resulted in the deletion of a routing filter on its distribution routers, which caused all possible routes to the internet to pass through the routers, exceeding the capacity of the routers on its core network.
1 day
Network Update
Internal
Full
2022
2021–2023 Iranian protests
Iran
80 million
globally cutting off its people’s access to the internet, whilst maintaining domestic national internet National Information Network
2023
Gaza war
Gaza Strip
lack of fuel led to internet services going down across the Gaza Strip
fuel shortages caused by the blockade
2024
July 2024 global cyber outages
Worldwide
million Windows devices
On July 19, 2024, various IT systems around the world experienced an outage that has led to ongoing disruptions across different industries, including media firms, banks, and airlines.
Security software faulty configuration update.
CrowdStrike
2024
2024 Bangladesh Quota Reform Movement
Bangladesh
The movement was being mobilized utilizing social media networks, and to establish control over the situation government applied a complete internet shutdown to suppress protests throughout the country.
5 days
government censorship
Bangladesh
Full
2025
2025 Internet blackout in Iran
Iran
The Islamic Republic of Iran blacked out the internet during the Iran–Israel war. The banking system crashed. WhatsApp was asked to be deleted.
Now
government censorship
Iran
2025
2025 Internet slowdown in the Middle East
United Arab Emirates and the Middle East
A major undersea cable located in the Red Sea was disrupted, triggering internet slowdowns mainly in the UAE and the Middle East since September 6, 2025. It is estimated to last six weeks, due to the process of repairing cables.
Now
Cable disruption in the Red Sea
Unknown
Full
2025
Afghanistan
Taliban reportedly imposes blackout in a crackdown on immorality.
government censorship
Taliban
2025
Cloudflare outage
Worldwide
~2,650,000,000
On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a global outage that caused widespread 500 errors, resulting in many websites running slowly, being unavailable, or not working at all for users around the world (including sites such as Twitter, Spotify, Uber, Canva, and ChatGPT).
6 hours
Database system integrated with the Bot Management service
A permissions change in a database triggered a bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management system
