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Internet 3 September 2025 - 25 April 2026

Cisco Systems’ Quantum Switch Push Puts Networking Giant in Race for the Next Internet

Cisco Systems’ Quantum Switch Push Puts Networking Giant in Race for the Next Internet

Cisco Systems, Inc. unveiled a switching chip it claims links multiple kinds of quantum computers—staking out a spot in quantum tech while steering clear of making the machines themselves. The San Jose network gear company introduced its prototype, dubbed the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch, saying it’s able to route quantum data via existing telecom fiber and does it all at room temperature. Timing is key here. Quantum computing is still largely confined to research, yet big tech players are already working to shape the standards for how these machines will connect, secure data, and expand. Cisco, echoing the pitch that fueled its legacy business, argues that the network is just as critical as the machines themselves.
25 April 2026
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Starlink in Iran: Trump to call Musk as blackout tightens grip

Starlink in Iran: Trump to call Musk as blackout tightens grip

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to speak with Elon Musk about bringing internet back to Iran via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. “He’s very good at that kind of thing, he’s got a very good company,” Trump told reporters. Since Thursday, Jan. 8, Iran has enforced a near-total internet blackout as protests over soaring prices escalated into demands for the clerical regime’s downfall. Tehran says it’s working with security forces to coordinate any restoration of service. Washington is considering its next steps but insists communication lines remain open through intermediaries. Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat and Iran specialist, commented, “I think it more likely that it puts these protests down eventually, but emerges from the process far weaker.”
12 January 2026
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Cloudflare (NET) Stock Soars on Q3 Earnings Beat and AI-Security Partnerships – Analysts Predict Further Gains

Cloudflare Down Today: Global Outage Knocks X, ChatGPT and Major Websites Offline on 18 November 2025

A major outage at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is disrupting large parts of the web today, Tuesday 18 November 2025. Popular services including X, ChatGPT, OpenAI’s other tools, Letterboxd, Canva, and several online games are either slow to load, partially available, or completely unreachable for many users around the world. BleepingComputer+3TechRadar+3Windows Central+3 According to Cloudflare’s own status page, the company is currently experiencing a “Major Outage” affecting its network and core services, with partial outages reported across multiple regions. Cloudflare Status+2Mirage News+2
18 November 2025
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AI Browser Wars: Perplexity Comet vs Google Chrome in the Race for the Web’s Future

AI Browser Wars: Perplexity Comet vs Google Chrome in the Race for the Web’s Future

The humble web browser has become the latest front in the AI revolution. Google Chrome, the long-reigning titan of internet browsing, is facing a new wave of challengers built around artificial intelligence. Chief among them is Perplexity’s Comet, a newly launched browser that bills itself as “the AI browser that acts as your personal assistant.” Unlike traditional browsers, Comet’s core is an AI agent ready to answer questions, automate web tasks, and transform how we interact with the internet Perplexity Rogerwong. This report provides an in-depth comparison of Perplexity Comet and Google Chrome – examining their browsing capabilities, search integrations, AI features, and the user experience – and evaluates how an AI-native upstart stacks up against a market-dominant incumbent. We’ll also survey the broader landscape: how competitors like Microsoft Edge, Arc/Dia, Brave, Opera, Firefox and even AI assistants are shaping the “browser wars” in the age of AI. Perplexity’s Comet is a web browser designed from the ground up to have a conversational AI built into every facet of the experience. Upon opening a new tab in Comet, users are greeted by a Comet AI assistant chat panel that’s aware of the current page and ready to help Perplexity. Rather
5 October 2025
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You Won’t Believe What Google Did This Month: July 2025’s Biggest Stories

Google Turns 27: The Shocking Rise of a Garage Project into a Tech Titan

In the mid-1990s, PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University built a search engine called “BackRub” that ranked web pages by link analysis. In Sept. 1997 they registered the name google.com to reflect their mission of organizing vast information youm7.com. In 1998 they received a $100,000 seed investment and formally incorporated Google on September 4, 1998 in a modest garage in Menlo Park, California youm7.com sawtksa.com. From the outset, Google’s PageRank algorithm proved superior to existing search engines. By the end of 1998 – just months after launch – Google had indexed about 60 million pages and was already the top choice for millions of web users youm7.com. This rapid early success funded continued expansion. By the early 2000s Google opened its Silicon Valley campus and hired hundreds of engineers.
27 September 2025
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‘Immorality’ Crackdown: Taliban’s Expanding Internet Ban Plunges Afghan Provinces into Digital Darkness

‘Immorality’ Crackdown: Taliban’s Expanding Internet Ban Plunges Afghan Provinces into Digital Darkness

When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghans feared a rollback of the relative freedom enjoyed over the prior two decades. Those fears have largely been realized. In the four years since the takeover, the Taliban have gutted Afghanistan’s independent media sector, shutting down over 400 outlets and replacing them with a state-controlled propaganda apparatus cpj.org. Hundreds of journalists have been arrested or driven into exile, and remaining media are forced to seek Taliban approval for any reporting cpj.org thediplomat.com. From day one of the new regime, women have been banned from most jobs and even barred from appearing on TV or radio thediplomat.com. The Taliban’s ideological clampdown has extended into the digital sphere gradually. They have systematically restricted online content deemed “un-Islamic” or immoral. As early as 2022, the Taliban banned the popular video app TikTok as well as the PUBG video game and even blocked pornography sites as part of a moral policing drive thediplomat.com. Officials also enforced strict surveillance measures: for example, new SIM card buyers must register with ID, ending anonymous internet access via mobile networks washingtonpost.com. Taliban fighters themselves have ironically embraced modern tech – using WhatsApp to coordinate military operations and spending
19 September 2025
Japan’s $300 Million Undersea Cable Gamble: Inside the Global Race to Secure the Internet’s Lifelines

Japan’s $300 Million Undersea Cable Gamble: Inside the Global Race to Secure the Internet’s Lifelines

Japan’s decision to bankroll NEC’s purchase of undersea cable vessels signals a major policy shift to protect the nation’s digital lifelines. According to officials, Tokyo is prepared to front hundreds of millions of dollars so that NEC – Asia’s biggest undersea cable installer – can acquire ocean-going cable-laying ships of its own Tomshardware Lightreading. Each such ship is a massive specialized vessel equipped to carry and slowly spool out thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic cable across ocean floors. Until now, NEC has owned zero of these, relying instead on leasing a Norwegian ship and renting smaller domestic vessels for regional projects Tomshardware. This made Japan an outlier; its rivals SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, and HMN Tech each operate fleets of 2–7 cable ships to swiftly serve their needs Tomshardware Lightreading. Japanese leaders now consider it untenable for a country of Japan’s size – which depends on subsea cables for 99% of its communications Csis – to lack sovereign capability to lay and repair those cables. Government officials told the Financial Times that NEC’s dependence on foreign-owned ships is a strategic weak point: if a cable fails or needs urgent installation, Japan could be stuck waiting in line for a leased
17 September 2025
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Arm’s $65 Billion Nasdaq Debut: SoftBank’s Chip Champion Reignites Tech IPO Mania

Arm’s $65 Billion Nasdaq Debut: SoftBank’s Chip Champion Reignites Tech IPO Mania

Arm Holdings is a Cambridge, England-based semiconductor and software design company that has quietly become the backbone of the mobile computing world. Founded in 1990 as “Advanced RISC Machines,” Arm began as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology investopedia.com. Unlike traditional chipmakers, Arm doesn’t build chips itself. Instead, it licenses its processor designs and instruction set architectures to other companies, who then incorporate Arm’s intellectual property into their own chips. This model turned Arm into a ubiquitous force in tech: its designs are found in virtually all smartphones, tablets, and many other devices globally, thanks to their power-efficient performance reuters.com. Major firms like Apple have built their flagship chips on Arm’s architecture, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon system-on-chips that run most Android phones are also Arm-based. By the mid-2010s, Arm’s low-power chip designs had made it a strategic asset, sometimes dubbed the “Switzerland of semiconductors” for its neutral licensing to hundreds of companies ig.com ig.com. In 2016, Japan’s SoftBank Group – led by CEO Masayoshi Son – acquired Arm for $32 billion, touting it as the “jewel in the crown” of UK tech ig.com. Under SoftBank, Arm remained privately held for seven years, during which it continued to
14 September 2025
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The Great AI Content Heist: How Bots Are Devouring the Internet – and How We Can Fight Back

The Great AI Content Heist: How Bots Are Devouring the Internet – and How We Can Fight Back

The rise of generative AI has kicked off an arms race for data, as AI companies seek to ingest as much online content as possible to train their models. Text from websites, images, code repositories, music – and now video – are all being vacuumed up. A bombshell report from The Atlantic in September 2025 revealed the sheer scale of this activity on YouTube: more than 15.8 million videos were quietly scraped and downloaded without permission as training data for AI theatlantic.com. These weren’t obscure clips either – nearly 1 million were how-to videos, and countless others came from popular creators and even major organizations like the BBC and TED theatlantic.com theatlantic.com. In many cases the videos were stripped of titles or creator names in the datasets to obscure their origin theatlantic.com, but investigators traced the data back to real YouTube channels. Crucially, this mass downloading violates YouTube’s terms of service – yet it has been happening largely unchecked theatlantic.com. AI developers have used third-party tools to rip videos en masse. YouTube appears to have done little, if anything, to stop the mass downloading, according to The Atlantic, and the company declined to comment on the situation theatlantic.com. In other
11 September 2025
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Global Internet on Edge: Cable Cuts, Satellite Gambits & Digital Freedom Fights (Sept 10–11, 2025)

Global Internet on Edge: Cable Cuts, Satellite Gambits & Digital Freedom Fights (Sept 10–11, 2025)

A sudden undersea cable crisis struck in early September, severing two key fiber-optic lines that carry internet traffic between continents. On Sept 7, network monitors at NetBlocks detected that the SEA-ME-WE 4 and IMEWE submarine cables were cut near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia reuters.com. The impact was felt across multiple countries: India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others all experienced drastically slowed internet speeds or partial outages as data traffic was forced onto alternate paths reuters.com reuters.com. Connectivity in parts of East Africa was also reportedly affected, given the importance of those cables for linking African networks to Europe and Asia. Technology giant Microsoft alerted customers that its Azure cloud services in the Middle East were seeing increased latency due to “multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea,” although it said it was routing traffic via other network paths to maintain service reuters.com reuters.com. Industry experts note that the Red Sea is one of the world’s most critical internet chokepoints, carrying an estimated 17% of global internet data between Europe, Africa and Asia timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Consequently, damage to cables in this corridor can have “wide-ranging consequences” timesofindia.indiatimes.com far beyond the immediate region. Bloomberg reports have highlighted the challenges of repairing
11 September 2025
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Internet Under Siege: Cable Chaos, Satellite Surges & Digital Divide Drama (Sept 9–10, 2025)

Internet Under Siege: Cable Chaos, Satellite Surges & Digital Divide Drama (Sept 9–10, 2025)

Sources: Global news reports and press releases from Sept 9–10, 2025 were used in compiling this roundup timesofindia.indiatimes.com aljazeera.com space.com reuters.com reuters.com prescottenews.com prescottenews.com prnewswire.com statescoop.com, along with statements from officials and industry leaders aljazeera.com aljazeera.com. Each development reflects the rapidly evolving landscape of global internet access – from physical infrastructure challenges and cutting-edge satellite deployments to the ongoing battles over digital rights and inclusion. The 48 hours of news around September 9–10, 2025, make one thing clear: the push to connect the world’s population continues to face both exciting breakthroughs and formidable obstacles.
10 September 2025
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Lightning-Fast Internet Finally Arrives in Tonga’s Far-Flung Islands? A Deep Dive into Tonga’s Connectivity Boom and Challenges

Lightning-Fast Internet Finally Arrives in Tonga’s Far-Flung Islands? A Deep Dive into Tonga’s Connectivity Boom and Challenges

Tonga – a Polynesian kingdom of over 170 islands – has seen dramatic improvements in internet connectivity over the past decade. Prior to 2013, Tonga’s internet was limited to expensive, slow satellite links, resulting in low penetration and high costs. This changed when the nation’s first submarine fiber-optic cable went live in August 2013, delivering affordable high-speed internet to Tongans “for the first time ever” worldbank.org. The 827 km Tonga Cable connects Nuku’alofa to Fiji, where it links into global networks worldbank.org. This milestone was heralded as “the beginning of a new era” for Tonga, promising faster speeds and more affordable prices for the 100,000 population worldbank.org worldbank.org. Indeed, in the years after the cable’s arrival, internet uptake surged: by 2021, about 57% of Tongans were online pulse.internetsociety.org pulse.internetsociety.org. Today, Tonga’s internet access is a mix of terrestrial broadband and satellite connectivity. The vast majority of users get online via mobile networks, as fixed-line broadband infrastructure is limited. The country’s two mobile operators, Digicel and TCC, provide coverage to all inhabited islands, reaching 95% of the population with at least 4G service pulse.internetsociety.org. Public WiFi hotspots and ADSL fixed broadband exist on Tongatapu, but mobile data is by far the
8 September 2025
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Samoa’s Internet Revolution: From Undersea Cables to Starlink Skies

Samoa’s Internet Revolution: From Undersea Cables to Starlink Skies

Samoa’s internet infrastructure has transformed significantly in the past decade. The backbone of connectivity is now fiber-optic submarine cables. The first major cable, Tui-Samoa, went live in 2018, linking Samoa to Suva, Fiji ssccsamoa.com ssccsamoa.com. This cable dramatically increased international bandwidth and reduced Samoa’s dependence on satellites for backhaul. A second international cable, the Manatua One Polynesia cable, was completed around 2020, connecting Samoa to neighboring Polynesian islands subtelforum.com. Having two separate cables improves resiliency – if one fails, the other can keep Samoa online. There is also a cross-connection to American Samoa’s cable system, providing additional redundancy to global routes. On land, Samoa has been extending fiber-optic networks to deliver broadband to homes and businesses in urban areas. Vodafone Samoa offers Fiber-to-the-Home in parts of Apia, the capital. Speeds of up to 100 Mbps download are advertised on these fiber plans vodafone.com.ws. However, FTTH coverage is still limited to densely populated areas and some pilot rural sites. The majority of Samoan homes do not have a physical fiber or copper broadband line. In fact, fixed broadband subscriptions are very scarce – less than 1 per 100 people as of 2022 datahub.itu.int – indicating that only a few thousand households
7 September 2025
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Global Internet Access Shockwaves: Cable Cuts, Censorship & Broadband Booms (Sept 6–7, 2025)

Global Internet Access Shockwaves: Cable Cuts, Censorship & Broadband Booms (Sept 6–7, 2025)

On September 6, a sudden multi-cable break in the Red Sea sent shockwaves through global connectivity. Several undersea fiber-optic cables were simultaneously cut near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia beaumontenterprise.com. The impact was felt across continents – internet traffic between Europe/Asia and the Middle East slowed to a crawl, and countries like Pakistan and India experienced degraded service beaumontenterprise.com. Microsoft’s Azure cloud warned users of increased latency as data was rerouted onto backup paths beaumontenterprise.com. In the Gulf, UAE customers on du and Etisalat noticed sluggish speeds beaumontenterprise.com. While the exact cause remains unclear, the incident raised alarms about possible sabotage amid regional conflicts. Experts noted that even an errant ship anchor can sever these vital lines in shallow seas beaumontenterprise.com. Repairs are underway, but with multiple deep-sea cuts, full restoration could take weeks. These cable cuts capped a troubling week of connectivity woes. In South Asia, Pakistan’s entire Balochistan province remains under a government-ordered mobile internet blackout amid military operations, a shutdown now stretching into weeks and keeping ~15 million people offline ts2.tech. And in Iraq, authorities continued imposing nationwide internet blackouts for a few hours each morning during high school exams to prevent cheating ts2.tech – an education-year ritual that
7 September 2025
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Internet Access Chaos: Blackouts, Crackdowns & Broadband Breakthroughs (Sept 5–6, 2025)

Internet Access Chaos: Blackouts, Crackdowns & Broadband Breakthroughs (Sept 5–6, 2025)

In early September 2025, multiple outages and deliberate shutdowns disrupted internet access for millions across different regions. In the United States, a major Verizon network failure on August 30 demonstrated the fragility of even advanced telecom systems ts2.tech. Starting around midday, Verizon mobile users from California to New York suddenly lost service, with their phones stuck in emergency “SOS only” mode instead of connecting to any network ts2.tech. By mid-afternoon, outage reports spiked above 23,000 as people complained they couldn’t make calls or use mobile data ts2.tech. Verizon attributed the blackout to a software issue in its 4G/5G core network and scrambled engineers to fix it ts2.tech. Service was largely restored by that evening after roughly 9 hours of downtime ts2.tech. It was Verizon’s third nationwide outage of 2025, prompting renewed debate over telecom reliability and calls for stronger oversight of network resiliency ts2.tech ts2.tech. The disruption had ripple effects – some users on other carriers experienced slowdowns in apps like Instagram and Twitter, illustrating how interdependent networks are and how a failure in one can jam internet traffic more broadly ts2.tech. For many Americans, the outage underscored how essential connectivity has become to daily life: during those hours, some
6 September 2025
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From Beaches to Broadband: Inside Saint Vincent & the Grenadines’ Internet Boom

From Beaches to Broadband: Inside Saint Vincent & the Grenadines’ Internet Boom

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines has seen a dramatic leap in fixed broadband availability and speeds in recent years. The country’s two main Internet Service Providers – Flow and Digicel – now deliver broadband via hybrid fiber-coaxial cable networks and fiber-to-the-home, respectively. These fixed networks cover the mainland and, increasingly, the smaller Grenadine islands thanks to the new undersea fiber backbone. Today, residents in the capital Kingstown or on outer islands like Bequia can all access high-speed home internet service. Typical entry-level packages offer on the order of 50–100 Mbps download speeds and higher-tier plans range up to a few hundred Mbps. Prices have become relatively reasonable by regional standards – for example, Digicel’s “Fibre 250” home plan costs about EC$129 per month ts2.tech, and Flow’s 100 Mbps cable plan is roughly EC$125. Both providers include unlimited data usage in home broadband plans, eliminating the caps that once plagued users of older DSL packages. Thanks to infrastructure investments, connection speeds have skyrocketed. On some islands, Flow’s upgrade from legacy copper DSL to fiber-fed coax in 2021 boosted customers from crawling 1–2 Mbps links to a minimum 50 Mbps via cable modems – an improvement of over 25× in average speeds
4 September 2025
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Blackouts, Crackdowns & Broadband Booms: Internet Access News Roundup (Sept 3–4, 2025)

Blackouts, Crackdowns & Broadband Booms: Internet Access News Roundup (Sept 3–4, 2025)

Over the past 48 hours, major investments in physical internet infrastructure were unveiled worldwide. SpaceX capped a busy summer of launches with yet another batch of 24 Starlink broadband satellites lifted into orbit on August 29 ts2.tech. This marked SpaceX’s fourth Starlink launch in a month, expanding its constellation and improving coverage in high-latitude regions like Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia ts2.tech. With this growth, Starlink continues to deliver high-speed internet to remote areas in dozens of countries. And it’s not alone – Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a rival low-Earth orbit satellite network, is accelerating its deployment. Amazon launched its first 27 Kuiper satellites in April and just announced that beta service will begin by late 2025, with another launch planned for September 25 ts2.tech. Ultimately Amazon aims for a 3,200+ satellite fleet beaming up to 1 Gbps internet to underserved regions globally ts2.tech. These rapid satellite rollouts are poised to bring broadband to hard-to-reach communities from the Arctic Circle to rural Asia, complementing terrestrial fiber and cellular networks. On the subsea front, new undersea fiber-optic cables are being laid to boost global bandwidth and network resilience. In Africa, Kenya’s top telco Safaricom – in partnership with Meta – just revealed the
4 September 2025
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From Satellite Struggles to Starlink: Tuvalu’s Internet Revolution

From Satellite Struggles to Starlink: Tuvalu’s Internet Revolution

Tuvalu is a Polynesian microstate of about 10,000 people spread across nine coral atolls. Until recently, its internet infrastructure consisted solely of satellite links – there were no subsea fiber cables, and even regional microwave links to neighbors were absent due to the vast ocean distances. All international and inter-island data traveled via satellite, terminating at earth stations in Funafuti and smaller VSAT terminals on outer islands en.wikipedia.org prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com. This satellite dependency made Tuvalu’s internet expensive, bandwidth-constrained, and prone to outages. For most of the 2010s, Tuvalu’s connectivity was extremely limited. In 2012, the total bandwidth for the entire country was only 512 kbps uplink and 1.5 Mbps downlink en.wikipedia.org – essentially a single slow broadband connection shared by everyone. Even by 2016, total capacity was under 80 Mbps prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com. This bottleneck meant that basic web browsing was sluggish and data-intensive activities were nearly impossible. Internet access was described as high-cost and limited, contributing to Tuvalu’s status as “one of the least connected countries in the world” as of 2019scoop.co.nz.
3 September 2025
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Stock Market Today

  • Google's $4.7B EU Antitrust Fine Stands After Top Court Ruling
    July 2, 2026, 5:20 AM EDT. The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the $4.7 billion fine Google faced over anti-competition practices, ending an eight-year fight. The decision leaves the EU's penalty in place and knocks out Google's final appeal in the case. Regulators have kept up pressure on big tech as questions over market competition persist.
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