Internet Disruptions & Iran’s Shutdown: Cloudflare Radar Insights (Storm in Portugal Included)

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:

• Cable cuts, storms, and DNS: a look at Internet disruptions in Q4 2025
• Introducing Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis
• Route leak incident on January 22, 2026
• Building a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver

⏱️ Timestamps

0:30 — Weekly blog roundup (Moltworker, Route Leak, Google’s AI Advantage)

4:13 — Storm impact in Portugal: what Radar saw in Leiria, Santarém, and Coimbra

11:55 — Iran’s multi-week Internet shutdown: scale, signals, and how it unfolded

18:15 — The “National Information Network”: partial access, allowlisting, and blocked services

21:24 — Power vs. connectivity: how electricity failures show up as Internet outages

22:33 — Q4 global round-up: Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and cyclone-driven disruptions

30:32 — Technical failures: ISP issues, DNS problems, routing mistakes, and what Radar detects

33:47 — The future of Radar: Starlink visibility, provider-level metrics, and disruption heat maps