The first quarter of 2026 saw a surge in severe and prolonged internet disruptions, from government shutdowns to power outages to the occasional mystery incident. So says content delivery network biz Cloudflare in its latest summary of the global activity it oversees across the interwebs. This takes in the whole gamut from severe weather to cable damage to various technical issues. AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now READ MORE One of the major incidents involved hostilities in the Middle East, where Iran authorities shut down the country's internet for 61 days (at the time of writing), following the assault by Israel and the US on February 28. This wasn't the first government-enforced blackout of the year in Iran, that started at 20:00 local time (16:30 UTC) on January 8 in response to nationwide protests against the ruling regime that began 11 days earlier. Traffic remained near zero until January 21, when a small amount returned, only to disappear around 24 hours later.…