Cloudflare’s view of Internet disruptions in Pakistan

On Tuesday, May 9, Imran Khan, former Prime Minister of Pakistan was arrested on corruption charges. Following the arrest, violent protests erupted in several cities, leading the government of Pakistan to order the shutdown of mobile Internet services, as well as the blocking of several social media platforms. Below, we examine the impact of these shutdowns at a national and local level, as seen through Cloudflare traffic data. In addition, we illustrate how Pakistanis appear to be turning to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver in an attempt to maintain access to the open Internet.

General traffic trends

Since Tuesday, May 9, peak traffic levels aggregated at a country level (as measured by HTTP request volume) have been declining, down nearly 30% during the first several days of the mobile Internet shutdowns. The lowest traffic levels (nadirs of the graph) have also declined, dropping by as much as one-third as well. In the sections below, we drill down into this traffic loss, looking at outages at a network level, and the impact of those outages at an administrative unit and city level.

The mobile network shutdowns have also impacted the profile of traffic that Cloudflare sees from Pakistan. In Continue reading

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2023

Cloudflare operates in more than 285 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 11,500 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions.

We entered 2023 with Internet disruptions due to causes that ran the gamut, including several government-directed Internet shutdowns, cyclones, a massive earthquake, power outages, cable cuts, cyberattacks, technical problems, and military action. As we have noted in the past, this post is intended as a summary overview of observed disruptions, and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter.

Government directed

Iran

Over the last six-plus months, government-directed Internet shutdowns in Iran have largely been in response to protests over the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody. While these shutdowns are still occurring in a limited fashion, a notable shutdown observed in January was intended to prevent cheating on academic exams. Internet shutdowns with a similar purpose have been observed across a number of other countries, and have also occurred in Continue reading

Cloudflare’s view of the Virgin Media outage in the UK

Just after midnight (UTC) on April 4, subscribers to UK ISP Virgin Media (AS5089) began experiencing an Internet outage, with subscriber complaints multiplying rapidly on platforms including Twitter and Reddit.

Cloudflare Radar data shows Virgin Media traffic dropping to near-zero around 00:30 UTC, as seen in the figure below. Connectivity showed some signs of recovery around 02:30 UTC, but fell again an hour later. Further nominal recovery was seen around 04:45 UTC, before again experiencing another complete outage between around 05:45-06:45 UTC, after which traffic began to recover, reaching expected levels around 07:30 UTC.

After the initial set of early-morning disruptions, Virgin Media experienced another round of issues in the afternoon. Cloudflare observed instability in traffic from Virgin Media’s network (called an autonomous system in Internet jargon) AS5089 starting around 15:00 UTC, with a significant drop just before 16:00 UTC. However in this case, it did not appear to be a complete outage, with traffic recovering approximately a half hour later.

Virgin Media’s Twitter account acknowledged the early morning disruption several hours after it began, posting responses stating “We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams Continue reading

A look at Internet traffic trends during Super Bowl LVII

The Super Bowl has been happening since the end of the 1966 season, the same year that the ARPANET project, which gave birth to the Internet, was initiated. Around 20 years ago, 50% of the US population were Internet users, and that number is now around 92%. So, it's no surprise that interest in an event like Super Bowl LVII resulted in a noticeable dip in Internet traffic in the United States at the time of the game's kickoff, dropping to around 5% lower than the previous Sunday. During the game, Rihanna's halftime show also caused a significant drop in Internet traffic across most states, with Pennsylvania and New York feeling the biggest impact, but messaging and video platforms saw a surge of traffic right after her show ended.

In this blog post, we will dive into who the biggest winners were among Super Bowl advertisers, as well as examine how traffic to food delivery services, social media and sports and betting websites changed during the game. In addition, we look at traffic trends seen at city and state levels during the game, as well as email threat volume across related categories in the weeks ahead of the game.

Cloudflare Continue reading

Internet disruptions overview for Q4 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions.

While Internet disruptions are never convenient, online interest in the 2022 World Cup in mid-November and the growth in online holiday shopping in many areas during November and December meant that connectivity issues could be particularly disruptive. Having said that, the fourth quarter appeared to be a bit quieter from an Internet disruptions perspective, although Iran and Ukraine continued to be hotspots, as we discuss below.

Government directed

Multi-hour Internet shutdowns are frequently used by authoritarian governments in response to widespread protests as a means of limiting communications among protestors, as well preventing protestors from sharing information and video with the outside world. During the fourth quarter Cuba and Sudan again implemented such shutdowns, while Iran continued the series of “Internet curfews” across mobile networks it started in mid-September, in addition to implementing several other regional Internet shutdowns.

Cuba

In Continue reading

Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year in Review

In 2022, with nearly five billion people around the world (as well as an untold number of “bots”) using the Internet, analyzing aggregate data about this usage can uncover some very interesting trends. To that end, we’re excited to present the Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year In Review, featuring interactive charts, graphs, and maps you can use to explore notable Internet trends observed throughout this past year. The Year In Review website is part of Cloudflare Radar, which celebrated its second birthday in September with the launch of Radar 2.0.

We have organized the trends we observed around three different topic areas: Traffic, Adoption, and Security. The content covered within each of these areas is described in more detail in their respective sections below. Building on the 2021 Year In Review, we have incorporated several additional metrics this year, and have also improved the underlying methodology. (As such, the charts are not directly comparable to develop insights into year-over-year changes.)

Website visualizations shown at a weekly granularity cover the period from January 2 through November 26, 2022 (the start of the first full week of the year through the end of the last full Continue reading

2022 US midterm elections attack analysis

Through Cloudflare’s Impact programs, we provide cyber security products to help protect access to authoritative voting information and the security of sensitive voter data. Two core programs in this space are the Athenian Project, dedicated to protecting state and local governments that run elections, and Cloudflare for Campaigns, a project with a suite of Cloudflare products to secure political campaigns’ and state parties’ websites and internal teams.

However, the weeks ahead of the elections, and Election Day itself, were not entirely devoid of attacks. Using data from Cloudflare Radar, which showcases global Internet traffic, attack, and technology trends and insights, we can explore traffic patterns, attack types, and top attack sources associated with both Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns participants.

For both programs, overall traffic volume unsurprisingly ramped up as Election Day approached. SQL Injection (SQLi) and HTTP Anomaly attacks were the two largest categories of attacks mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), and the United States was the largest source of observed attacks — see more on this last point below.

Below, we explore the trends seen across both customer sets from October 1, 2022, through Election Day on November 8.

Athenian Project

Throughout Continue reading

Internet disruptions overview for Q3 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 275 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. In many cases, these disruptions can be attributed to a physical event, while in other cases, they are due to an intentional government-directed shutdown. In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the third quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography. The new Cloudflare Radar Outage Center provides additional information on these, and other historical, disruptions.

Government directed shutdowns

Unfortunately, for the last decade, governments around the world have turned to shutting down the Internet as a means of controlling or limiting communication among citizens and with the outside world. In the third quarter, this was an all too popular cause of observed disruptions, impacting countries and regions in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Iraq

As Continue reading

The status page the Internet needs: Cloudflare Radar Outage Center

Historically, Cloudflare has covered large-scale Internet outages with timely blog posts, such as those published for Iran, Sudan, Facebook, and Syria. While we still explore such outages on the Cloudflare blog, throughout 2022 we have ramped up our monitoring of Internet outages around the world, posting timely information about those outages to @CloudflareRadar on Twitter.

The new Cloudflare Radar Outage Center (CROC), launched today as part of Radar 2.0, is intended to be an archive of this information, organized by location, type, date, etc.

Furthermore, this initial release is also laying the groundwork for the CROC to become a first stop and key resource for civil society organizations, journalists/news media, and impacted parties to get information on, or corroboration of, reported or observed Internet outages.

What information does the CROC contain?

At launch, the CROC includes summary information about observed outage events. This information includes:

• Location: Where was the outage?
• ASN: What autonomous system experienced a disruption in connectivity?
• Type: How broad was the outage? Did connectivity fail nationwide, or at a sub-national level? Did just a single network provider have an outage?
• Scope: If it was a sub-national/regional Continue reading

Protests spur Internet disruptions in Iran

Over the past several days, protests and demonstrations have erupted across Iran in response to the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini was a 22-year-old woman from the Kurdistan Province of Iran, and was arrested on September 13, 2022, in Tehran by Iran’s “morality police”, a unit that enforces strict dress codes for women. She died on September 16 while in police custody.

Published reports indicate that the growing protests have resulted in at least eight deaths. Iran has a history of restricting Internet connectivity in response to protests, taking such steps in May 2022, February 2021, and November 2019. They have taken a similar approach to the current protests, including disrupting Internet connectivity, blocking social media platforms, and blocking DNS. The impact of these actions, as seen through Cloudflare’s data, are reviewed below.

Impact to Internet traffic

In the city of Sanandij in the Kurdistan Province, several days of anti-government protests took place after the death of Mahsa Amini. In response, the government reportedly disrupted Internet connectivity there on September 19. This disruption is clearly visible in the graph below, with traffic on TCI (AS58224), Iran’s fixed-line incumbent operator, in Sanandij dropping to zero between Continue reading

Internet disruptions overview for Q2 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 270 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. In many cases, these disruptions can be attributed to a physical event, while in other cases, they are due to an intentional government-directed shutdown. In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause or common geography.

Optic outages

This quarter, we saw the usual complement of damage to both terrestrial and submarine fiber-optic cables, including one that impacted multiple countries across thousands of miles, and another more localized outage that was due to an errant rodent.

Comcast

On April 25, Comcast subscribers in nearly 20 southwestern Florida cities experienced an outage, reportedly due to a fiber cut. The traffic impact of this cut is clearly visible in the graph below, with Cloudflare traffic Continue reading

Internet Explorer, we hardly knew ye

On May 19, 2021, a Microsoft blog post announced that “The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge” and that “the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10.” According to an associated FAQ page, those “certain versions” include Windows 10 client SKUs and Windows 10 IoT. According to data from Statcounter, Windows 10 currently accounts for over 70% of desktop Windows market share on a global basis, so this “retirement” impacts a significant number of Windows systems around the world.

As the retirement date for Internet Explorer 11 has recently passed, we wanted to explore several related usage trends:

• Is there a visible indication that use is declining in preparation for its retirement?
• Where is Internet Explorer 11 still in the heaviest use?
• How does the use of Internet Explorer 11 compare to previous versions?
• How much Internet Explorer traffic is “likely human” vs. “likely automated”?
• How do Internet Explorer usage patterns compare with those of Microsoft Edge, its replacement?

The long goodbye

Publicly released in January 2020, and automatically rolled out to Windows users starting Continue reading

Exam time means Internet disruptions in Syria, Sudan and Algeria

It is once again exam time in Syria, Sudan, and Algeria, and with it, we find these countries disrupting Internet connectivity in an effort to prevent cheating on these exams. As they have done over the past several years, Syria and Sudan are implementing multi-hour nationwide Internet shutdowns. Algeria has also taken a similar approach in the past, but this year appears to be implementing more targeted website/application blocking.

Syria

Syria has been implementing Internet shutdowns across the country since 2011, but exam-related shutdowns have only been in place since 2016. In 2021, exams took place between May 31 and June 22, with multi-hour shutdowns observed on each of the exam days.

This year, the first shutdown was observed on May 30, with subsequent shutdowns (to date) seen on June 2, 6, and 12. In the Cloudflare Radar graph below, traffic for Syria drops to zero while the shutdowns are active. According to Internet Society Pulse, several additional shutdowns are expected through June 21. Each takes place between 02000530 UTC (0500–0830 local time). According to a published report, the current exam cycle covers more than 500,000 students for basic and general secondary education certificates.

Consistent with Continue reading

AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts impact millions of users across multiple countries

Just after 1200 UTC on Tuesday, June 7, the Africa-Asia-Europe-1 (AAE-1) and SEA-ME-WE-5 (SMW-5) submarine cables suffered cable cuts. The damage reportedly occurred in Egypt, and impacted Internet connectivity for millions of Internet users across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa, as well as thousands of miles away in Asia. In addition, Google Cloud Platform and OVHcloud reported connectivity issues due to these cable cuts.

The impact

Data from Cloudflare Radar showed significant drops in traffic across the impacted countries as the cable damage occurred, recovering approximately four hours later as the cables were repaired.

It appears that Saudi Arabia may have also been affected by the cable cut(s), but the impact was much less significant, and traffic recovered almost immediately.

In the graphs above, we show that Ethiopia was one of the impacted countries. However, as it is landlocked, there are obviously no submarine cable landing points within the country. The Afterfibre map from the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) shows that that fiber in Ethiopia connects to fiber in Somalia, which experienced an impact. In addition, Ethio Telecom also routes traffic through network providers in Kenya and Djibouti. Djibouti Telecom, one of these providers, in turn Continue reading

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. In many cases, these disruptions can be attributed to a physical event, while in other cases, they are due to an intentional government-directed shutdown. In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause.

Plate tectonics

Internet outages caused by “earth movers” are more frequently caused by errant backhoes. However, two Internet disruptions in the first quarter were caused by more significant earth movement — a volcanic eruption and an earthquake.

The first impacted connectivity on the island nation of Tonga, when the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption damaged the submarine cable connecting Tonga to Fiji, resulting in a 38 day Internet outage. After the January 14 eruption, only minimal Internet traffic (via satellite Continue reading

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

On the morning of March 8, a post to Hacker News stated that “All .fj domains have gone offline”, listing several hostnames in domains within the Fiji top level domain (known as a ccTLD) that had become unreachable. Commenters in the associated discussion thread had mixed results in being able to reach .fj hostnames—some were successful, while others saw failures. The fijivillage news site also highlighted the problem, noting that the issue also impacted Vodafone’s M-PAiSA app/service, preventing users from completing financial transactions.

The impact of this issue can be seen in traffic to Cloudflare customer zones in the .com.fj second-level domain. The graph below shows that HTTP traffic to these zones dropped by approximately 40% almost immediately starting around midnight UTC on March 8. Traffic volumes continued to decline throughout the rest of the morning.

Looking at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver data for queries for .com.fj hostnames, we can also see that error volume associated with those queries climbs significantly starting just after midnight as well. This means that our resolvers encountered issues with the answers from .fj servers.

This observation suggests that the problem was strictly DNS related, rather than connectivity related—Cloudflare Radar Continue reading

How The Gambia lost access to the Internet for more than 8 hours

Internet outages are more common than most people think, and may be caused by misconfigurations, power outages, extreme weather, or infrastructure damage. Note that such outages are distinct from state-imposed shutdowns that also happen all too frequently, generally used to deal with situations of unrest, elections or even exams.

On the morning of January 4, 2022, citizens of The Gambia woke up to a country-wide Internet outage. Gamtel (the main state-owned telecommunications company of the West Africa country), announced that it happened due to "technical issues on the backup links" — we elaborate more on this below.

Cloudflare Radar shows that the outage had a significant impact on Internet traffic in the country and started after 01:00 UTC (which is the same local time), lasting until ~09:45 — a disruption of over 8 hours.

Looking at  BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates from Gambian ASNs around the time of the outage, we see a clear spike at 01:10 UTC. These update messages are BGP signaling that the Gambian ASNs are no longer routable.

It is important to know that BGP is a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (networks) on the Internet. The routers that make the Continue reading

What Does Normal Look Like Now? COVID’s Impact on the Internet

Six months ago, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, it accelerated the shift out of offices and schools and onto the Internet. Back then, we asked if the Internet was resilient enough to withstand Coronavirus. After several months of observations, we confirmed that it is, thanks to the strength, resilience and success of the open architecture that underpins it. Since then, concerns about the Internet’s ability to handle the increase in lockdown-driven traffic seem to have abated, resulting in fewer articles and blog posts on the topic.

Getting Back to Normal

As we head into the final months of 2020, some businesses have reopened in a limited capacity, allowing employees to return to their brick-and-mortar workplaces. Many students are also returning to school, whether in person or online. Yet, the lack of affordable and available Internet access remains a significant issue. Earlier this year, we heard stories about students sitting outside schools and libraries in search of reliable WiFi in order to attend classes. As the new school year starts in North America, we heard about students using WiFi signals from a local fast food chain restaurant to complete their homework. And with students now needing to Continue reading

Holding Steady: How CDNs, IXPs, and Network Providers Help Keep us Online

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is, unfortunately, far from over, the Internet continues to be resilient, supporting the additional demands that we have placed on it, including the rapid growth in online learning, work videoconferences, e-commerce, streaming video entertainment, and more.

Because the Internet exists as a network of networks, this resilience is largely due to the planning, actions, and cooperation of all of the interconnected participants. These participants include, but are certainly not limited to, network providers, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

Expanding Infrastructure

On the network side, major providers such as Comcast have invested billions of dollars over the last several years in expanding fiber infrastructure and growing network capacity. In contrast, community network provider NYC Mesh is leveraging DIY customer installations to grow its own infrastructure during the pandemic. While there is still much work to be done, these efforts by both large and small network operators as well as similar operators all over the world, are making reliable broadband connectivity more widely available. Infrastructure expansion is vital as the current pandemic has shown that access to reliable Internet is now more important than ever before.

Fast and Reliable Content Delivery

CDN providers are also doing their Continue reading

How Has COVID-19 Impacted Last Mile Networks?

If your household is anything like mine, your Internet connection has experienced a significant increase in usage over these last several months. We’re streaming more and more media each day, and we’re on seemingly endless hours of videoconferences for work and for school. While all of that streaming media consumes downstream capacity, those videoconferences can generate a significant amount of upstream traffic. I’m fortunate enough to have fiber-based broadband connectivity that can easily handle this traffic, but I know others aren’t as lucky. They’re stuck with copper-based connections or satellite links that struggle to deliver streaming media or video calls with any sort of viewable quality.

Across this spectrum of “last mile” Internet connections, I looked at the impact from both a provider and user perspective. What kind of traffic growth have last mile network providers experienced? What steps have these providers taken to ensure they have sufficient capacity? And most importantly for end users, how has increased traffic impacted last mile connection speeds?

The network connections from customer- and subscriber-facing Internet service providers are often referred to as last mile networks. These are Internet services delivered over a notional distance – the “last mile” – to subscriber premises, such Continue reading