Why the internet kept breaking and taking down your favorite sites in 2025

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

ZDNET's key takeaways

• Physical internet infrastructure problems became more common.
• Good old network foul-ups also contributed to failures.
• The internet is bigger, faster, and more fragile than ever.

You may have noticed there were many internet disruptions last year. It wasn't your imagination. We saw Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and perhaps 2025's most damaging disruption of all, October's AWS collapse. 

Also: The internet: Bigger, more fragile than ever - and 'fundamentally rewired' by AI

However, there were far more issues that you may have missed. 

Cloudflare's latest internet disruptions report shows a global network that's still fragile in the face of storms, cable cuts, and cloud glitches, but somewhat less prone to government‑ordered shutdowns than it was earlier in the decade.

Worldwide internet disruptions

Altogether, Cloudflare reported in its ...