When the internet is shut down, more than a connection is lost in the dark.

No. 004

The Internet Shutdowns Issue

About this issue

Government-imposed internet shutdowns are on the rise globally, with devastating impacts on affected communities. Fighting back requires shining a light where governments impose the dark.

The Problem

At 12:34 p.m. local time on January 28, 2011, the lights went out in Egypt.

A lmost simultaneously, about 3,500 individual Border Gateway Protocol routes – the paths systems use to communicate across the global internet – were withdrawn on orders from the Egyptian government, cutting the country off from the rest of the world and bringing internal communication to a halt. For five days, 93 percent of Egyptian networks remained completely unreachable.1

The internet shutdown in Egypt, brought on by a series of anti-government protests that had begun three days earlier, was not the first instance of government manipulation of the web.

The previous year, Tunisia significantly ramped up its already aggressive blocking of specific websites in response to unrest that would ultimately unseat its government.2 In 2009, Iran, facing protests against the disputed victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in that year’s presidential election, slowed the internet to a crawl.3 And in 2007, Guinean President Lansana Conté mandated the first widely known blackout, shutting down the fledgling internet industry in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population had access at all.4 5 But never before had an entire country, one where more than a quarter of the population was connected to the internet, simply severed itself from the open web.6

The Egyptian government’s actions, spotlighting a long-ignored risk, immediately reverberated across the world.

“Since we began tracking government-initiated internet shutdowns, their use has proliferated at a truly alarming pace.” – Felicia Anthonio, campaigner and #KeepItOn lead at Access Now

The international backlash was swift and forceful. In the United States, a long-touted bill that would grant the president emergency powers to shut off the internet died in the Senate amid the public uproar without ever receiving a vote.7 Leaders in Germany, Austria, Australia, and the European Parliament, meanwhile, were compelled to assure the public that they would never seek the authority to shut down the internet within their borders.8 9 10 11

In the years since, internet shutdowns have been condemned as a violation of human rights by the United Nations, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Organization of American States, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Freedom Online Coalition, and a host of other international organizations and NGOs.12 13

But even as international condemnation has mounted in the years since 2011, the number of shutdowns – intentional disruptions of internet-based communications by state actors – has grown exponentially, exploding from just a handful in 2012 to at least 213 across 33 countries in 2019.14 15 In 2020, even as the total number of shutdowns ticked down slightly due to delayed elections and global stay-at-home orders driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, the total duration of internet shutdowns worldwide jumped 49 percent.16

“Since we began tracking government-initiated internet shutdowns, their use has proliferated at a truly alarming pace,” explains Felicia Anthonio, Campaigner and #KeepItOn Lead at Access Now, a global human rights organization that works to defend and extend the digital rights of people around the world and has been tracking internet shutdowns since 2016. “As governments across the globe learn this authoritarian tactic from each other, it has moved from the fringes to become a common method many authorities use to stifle opposition, quash free speech and muzzle expression.”

“They use [internet shutdowns] to frustrate people — especially the youth — and to block the flow of information and keep people in fear.”

— Daisy, 30, Kampala, Uganda

Internet shutdowns lie along a spectrum, from a full shutdown or blackouts that cut off access to the entire web within a given region, to more targeted partial shutdowns that impact specific services, like popular social media and messaging apps.

The justifications for shutdowns range from national security concerns to curbing the spread of misinformation, and even preventing cheating on standardized tests. But as blunt instruments impacting entire populations, they raise grave human rights concerns.17 18 They also have devastating effects on the economy, healthcare, education, and civil society.

In just the first five months of 2021, Access Now documented 50 internet shutdowns in 21 countries. These disruptions interfere with freedom of opinion and expression, access to information, and freedom of assembly. During crises, like armed conflict or the COVID-19 pandemic of the last year, shutdowns further cut individuals off from life-saving information.

Shutdowns also cost the global economy billions. In Myanmar, where shutdowns have been the most prolonged and severe, the economic loss is estimated at 2.1 billion USD, more than 2.5 percent of the nation’s GDP. In percentage terms, Myanmar’s shutdowns have inflicted on the country approximately half the damage wrought by the Great Recession on the US economy in less than a third of the time.19

Shutting Off the Lights

The internet is not a single network, but a network of networks.

The closest the internet has to a core are the roughly 420 submarine fiber-optic cables – each a network unto itself – that span an estimated total of more than 800,000 miles. Enough to circle the globe 30 times over, this underwater cable highway transforms isolated networks into the global web.

Commonly known as the internet backbone, these cables, through which the entire global web – text messages and bank transactions, home videos and CT scans – flows as pulses of light through strands of glass little wider than a human hair, are more akin to its spinal cord.

And severing them can leave entire regions immobilized.

In 2008, unintentional damage to two fiber optic cables in the Mediterranean Sea cut connection speeds by up to 70 percent in 14 countries from North Africa to India for several days, while the Maldives was taken offline entirely.20 21 Internet shutdowns, however, rarely stem from intentional damage to the internet’s physical infrastructure.

When these submarine backbone cables reach shore, they connect to regional and national networks using the Border Gateway Protocol in a process known as peering.

At these edge points, networks exchange information not only about how to connect with each other, but also the paths to every other network they can reach, creating a global map of the web.

These regional and national networks, in turn, peer with lower-level networks, all the way down to the local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that carry the global web down to an individual device.

This hierarchical, distributed structure makes the web as a whole remarkably robust, but creates multiple pinch points, allowing state actors to choke off access not just to entire countries, but also subregions and even specific neighborhoods. It can also make shutdowns particularly challenging to track and verify.

In countries where shutdowns are most common, ISPs are often owned by just a handful of providers including, commonly, the state. But even privately held network owners can be compelled to comply with government orders to restrict access to the web.

In highly developed markets like the United States, where there are thousands of ISPs, the sheer size of the market provides a degree of protection. But in many countries, as in Egypt in 2011, the web can be brought to a shuddering halt with just a few phone calls.22

National networks

Regional networks

Shutdowns — both full and partial — are implemented through local ISPs using six primary methods:

Throttling

IP Blocking

Devices connected to the internet, including phones, computers, and the servers that host websites, locate each other across the web by means of unique keys called IP Addresses. ISPs can use these addresses to target shutdowns with almost surgical precision, blocking specific websites and platforms in narrow geographic locations, while still allowing particular individuals in affected regions unfettered access.

Mobile Data Shutoffs

DNS Interference

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the internet, pairing domain names like google.com with an IP address where that website can be reached. Much like the web itself, DNS is a hierarchical system, and these initial requests generally pass through one or more devices, known as recursive resolvers, before reaching the authoritative sources that pair domain names with IP addresses.

When a web service is first requested by a client, its IP address is often stored, or cached, on a resolver on the network. This allows for faster response times, but also creates opportunities for manipulation.

ISPs, which typically control a resolver, can configure it to return no response, an invalid IP address, or the address of a different service entirely, redirecting the user to a location they didn’t intend to reach. Even if the ISP's resolver is operating correctly, a DNS injector inserted upstream of the resolver can respond more quickly than the authoritative sources, resulting in users receiving forged answers in an attack known as “cache poisoning.”

Server Name Identification Blocking

For much of the early history of the web, communication between devices and the servers hosting websites was unencrypted and took place in the open. This made it easy for network owners to interfere with communication over the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the standard used for most internet-based communication, with websites they wished to block. The advent and rapid spread of HTTPS, an encrypted standard extending HTTP, has made it much more difficult for censors to eavesdrop on or tamper with this communication. Instead, network owners intervene before a secure connection can be established, blocking the connection as soon as a server name identification request is made to a targeted service.

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)

Information to be transmitted across the internet is first cut up into smaller pieces called packets. These packets consist of two parts: a header, containing information about where the packet originated, its destination, and other metadata used for routing, and a payload, consisting of the actual contents of the communication. During standard internet-based communication, only data in the packet header is used.

DPI occurs when network owners dig deeper into the packet payload to learn not only about which sites or applications individuals are visiting, but what they are doing on them, allowing for much finer-grained control over access to information. In some cases, governments even alter the payload, changing the contents of a website or message as it is being transmitted to the user.

The additional information network owners and monitors can glean from DPI can be used during internet shutdowns to block connections even via Virtual Private Networks. More commonly, however, DPI is used as part of larger and more sophisticated permanent censorship and surveillance operations, like the Great Firewall of China, allowing censors to block access to specific content rather than entire services.

In practice, governments often implement shutdowns using a combination of these tactics. And shutdowns themselves are often dynamic, escalating from partial shutdowns impacting just a few sites and services to total blackouts before receding again.

As tactics evolve, some countries where blackouts have become a fixture of daily life are graduating from shutdowns to far more sophisticated, and permanent, controls on the internet, casting their people into a perpetual informational half-light.

A Gathering Dark

While data prior to 2016 is patchy, and the true total number of internet shutdowns is likely unknowable, nearly 850 intentional shutdowns have been documented and verified over the last decade via Access Now’s Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP). Of these, 768 shutdowns across 63 countries have taken place just in the last five years.

Once a seemingly minor and geographically isolated problem, incidents of shutdowns have grown at an exponential rate, impacting 33 separate countries in 2019 alone and peaking in 2018 with a 72 percent surge in the number of shutdowns year over year.

Now, there is rarely a day where at least one part of the world has not been cast into the dark.

total shutdowns

hours without connectivity

countries impacted

*Data visualized is an approximation based on data from Access Now

Shutdown Spotlight

United States

August 11, 2011

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the government agency in charge of San Francisco’s subway system, shut down mobile service at four stations to suppress protests over the police shooting of an unarmed passenger the previous month. Although the subway is not a typical setting, this moment bore many of the hallmarks of an internet shutdown, and was the first known instance of a government enforced outage in the US. The act drew angry comparisons with 2011’s shutdown in Egypt, sparking a heated legal debate and an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Shutdown Spotlight

Ecuador

March 28, 2014

Following the hacking of the Ecuadorian President’s official Twitter Account on March 27, and the subsequent publication of personal emails from the country’s top spy chief, internet users in Ecuador reported they were unable to access Google and YouTube services. Another leak from one of Ecuador’s largest ISPs revealed the outage was a direct censorship order from the government, and likely made in responses to the hack.

Shutdown Spotlight

Togo

September 5, 2017 – September 11, 2017

When anti-government protests in support of multi-party elections broke out in August of 2017, the Togolese government shut off the internet and began drafting legislation to allow them to hit the killswitch at will. The move triggered a legal battle that resulted in a pivotal 2020 decision by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Community Court of Justice, a body that holds jurisdiction over 15 states in West Africa. ECOWAS held that the 2017 shutdown had violated human rights, and ordered the government to pay restitution and keep the internet on in the future.

Shutdown Spotlight

Sudan

June 3, 2019 – July 10, 2019

Amid weeks of growing tensions following the removal of President Omar al-bashir in April, including a government attack on protestors that saw the deaths of nearly 100 people, the Sudanese government employed a partial, and then full, internet shutdown. The shutdown drew widespread condemnation, and at the 41st Session of UN Human Rights council, in her opening remarks Michelle Bachelet, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, labeled Sudan’s actions a brutal crackdown, and urged the government to “put an end to the repression of the people’s human rights, and to immediately end the internet shutdown.”

Shutdown Spotlight

Papua and West Papua, Indonesia

August 29, 2019 – September 5, 2019

Anti-racist protests broke out across the Papuan region in 2019 following an incident in Java, on August 18, where Papuan students where taunted with racist epithets. Protests in the region drew thousands over the following days – as well as a heavy military response – as calls for independence for the region emerged. Authorities subsequently cut internet access across the entire region as a security measure. In 2020 the Jakarta State Administrative Court ruled that the shutdown had been illegal, and that while the government could block access to illegal content, it could not cut off access to the entire internet.

Shutdown Spotlight

Myanmar

June 19, 2019 – Ongoing

The longest internet shutdown in history began on June 19, 2019 when authorities blocked access in Rakhine and Chin states in western Myanmar amid an escalation in violence between the military and the Arakan Army. Following a military coup on February 1, 2021, access was briefly restored in the two states, while the rest of the country faced a new total shutdown on internet access. Several days later, on February 5, access was again cut in the region and connections remain unreliable across the country.

Use arrows to explore shutdowns

New Perspectives

Voices From the Dark

T hose impacted by internet shutdowns do not experience them as aggregate statistics – discrete ticks down in GDP or educational attainment rates. Shutdowns upend entire lives, severing people’s connections to the world. More than anything else, perhaps, shutdowns deny individuals their voice. But it is only through their stories that the true impact of shutdowns can be understood.

Click on a name
to read their story

“Losing access to the internet can seem like a trivial thing,” Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Venezuelan lawyer, digital rights activist, and #KeepItOn fellow with Access Now, says. “But the pandemic over the last year has shown that the internet truly is a lifeline. When governments shut down the internet, all elements of people’s lives are impacted.”

Shutdowns don’t merely stop people from sending a text or browsing updates on social media. As the internet has grown central to virtually every aspect of life across the globe, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, their effects ripple through impacted communities, depressing local economies, cutting off access to education, impeding healthcare delivery, and stifling political opposition.

“When I lost the internet, I think I lost my life. There is no hope for us now.”

— Shamima Bibi, Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

Endangering Lives

As the internet has grown central to healthcare provision, shutdowns pose an increasing risk to human life. While little empirical research exists quantifying the effects, anecdotal evidence suggests that blanket blackouts not only disrupt vital flows of communications between patients and doctors, they can also lead to medicine shortages, delay the deployment of critical medical professionals to emergencies, and threaten the financial viability of healthcare providers.23 24 25

The COVID-19 pandemic brought these issues into sharp relief: Blackouts cut entire regions off from life-saving public health advice, leaving some communities in Myanmar completely unaware of the existence of the virus months into the pandemic, while in Kashmir shutdowns prevented downloads of mobile test and trace apps, stymying efforts to contain the virus as infection rates exploded across the subcontinent.26 27

Immobilizing Economies

Between January 2019 and June 2021, 228 major internet shutdowns in 41 countries cost the global economy billions.28 29 But this figure provides only a hazy glimpse of the direct costs of shutdowns.

Unable to connect with international partners and domestic consumers, business owners impacted by shutdowns regularly report lost deals and opportunities for expansion, depriving local communities of economic growth. Informal economic activity, which in many countries commonly takes place via internet platforms including WhatsApp and Facebook groups, ceases when the networks drop.

Internet shutdowns also regularly impact both ATMs and mobile money providers, grinding commerce to a halt. With no means to make or receive payments, businesses are often forced to close entirely.30

Shutdowns also impose heavy costs on network providers, limiting the number of providers willing to enter the market and perpetuating the conditions that facilitate shutdowns in the first place.31

In 2018, Al-Jazeera reported how a 93-day shutdown in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon had crippled the country’s burgeoning technology industry, forcing businesses to shutter and workers to relocate to new areas of the country or to leave entirely.32 33

Obstructing Educations

Shutdowns also have a devastating impact on the education systems of affected countries. Even a 1 percent increase in a country’s level of internet connectivity has positive impacts on both educational attainment rates and GDP per capita, highlighting the educational stakes of shutdowns.34 Research has further shown that network disruptions interfere with lesson planning, instruction, and learning as well as impeding communication between instructors, school administrators, students, and families.35

School closures driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting roughly 90 percent of enrolled students globally in 2020, made the impact of internet shutdowns on education particularly acute.36 With remote instruction inaccessible, students were forced to make painful choices to forgo their education or risk not only their health, but also the health and safety of their families and communities.37 38 39

“...the pandemic over the last year has shown that the internet is a lifeline. When governments shut off the internet, there’s no part of people’s lives that isn’t affected.”

— Marianne Díaz Hernandéz, lawyer, digital rights activist, and #KeepItOn fellow

Silencing Dissent

Shutdowns are most commonly deployed around elections and moments of potential social unrest, particularly public demonstrations. While usually excused on grounds of stemming the spread of misinformation and promoting public order, their true purpose is often more nefarious.

“When the internet was shut down, closures of the TV stations that had been supportive of the protests followed...” – Benjamin, 34, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo

During elections, government-imposed blackouts prevent opposition candidates from connecting with voters to build support, restrict the ability of citizens to organize, and undermine the efforts of election observers to ensure the integrity of the vote, insulating those in power from democratic accountability.

In 2021, the Ugandan government ordered a complete internet blackout on the eve of their national elections – elections already marred by violence and the arrest of rival candidates. Amnesty International quickly decried the move as “clearly intended to silence the few accredited election observers, opposition politicians, human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and bloggers who are monitoring the elections.”40 41

More chillingly, regimes can use shutdowns to conceal far graver human rights abuses, including attacks on civilians. Researchers found that violence during the heat of the Syrian Civil War in 2012 peaked during internet shutdowns, while Amnesty International determined Iran had used a shutdown to conceal the killing of 300 civilian protesters in 2019, suggesting they have become part of a playbook to mask heavy-handed tactics by armed forces.42 43

Countermeasures

T he internet has allowed entire countries to leapfrog forward in their development, delivering the latest information and resources to students and teachers, connecting healthcare workers with remote communities to save lives, and providing a platform for individuals to express themselves and connect across the globe. But the web is not unbreakable.

It’s vital society has access to tools to expose where access is being cut off, technologies that mitigate the destructive potential of shutdowns, and connected global movements to help drive change.

States rarely admit to cutting off access to the internet, and the distributed, physical infrastructure of the web can provide cover for malignant actors, meaning internet shutdowns have historically been notoriously difficult to track. But in recent years, through the combined efforts of academics, technologists and NGOs, new systems have been created to document and verify shutdowns, shining a brighter light on the problem.

Tracking Outages

The Google Transparency Report logs access disruptions to Google products, both accidental and intentional, along with direct access to the outage data and additional context, shining a light on government interference with the web worldwide.

This report, alongside Facebook’s Transparency Center and Access Now’s STOP database, contributes crucial data for The Internet Society’s Pulse tracker. By providing a live view of global shutdowns and their impact alongside historical data and local context, Pulse and other tools developed by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), Kentik, and Censored Planet, play a crucial role in exposing shutdowns worldwide.

Measuring the Cost

The full economic damage caused by internet shutdowns is incalculable, but methodology developed by the Brookings Institution and the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) can provide an estimate of the staggering first-order costs of full and partial shutdowns around the globe.

These methodologies highlight the extreme toll shutdowns impose, providing critical context to citizens, journalists, and policy makers, and allowing them to hold governments accountable for their actions.

Shutdowns lie along a spectrum – from the targeted blocking of a single site (partial) to complete blackouts (full) – and governments deploy a wide array of tactics in the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between those who seek to shut down access to information, and those who seek to circumvent them.

While full internet blackouts can be extremely difficult to circumvent, a range of tools exist to dampen the impacts of partial shutdowns on individuals and communities. As partial shutdowns rely on both identifying attempted connections to banned services and subsequently interfering with those connections, this form of censorship can be bypassed by successfully preventing either.

For those impacted by shutdowns, Access Now provides a global Digital Security Helpline, which offers direct technical assistance to connect people with the services that can keep them online. Jigsaw has also been exploring various mitigation techniques, with tools such as Outline and Intra.

Mesh Networks

While impractical for most internet uses, and often lacking in adequate security, mesh networks can provide essential connectivity during full internet shutdowns.

Mesh networks work by bypassing telecommunications infrastructure, tapping straight into radio frequencies that pass data to nearby devices. From there, the data travels – hop by hop – until it can reach its destination or an open network, allowing information from impacted regions to reach the world.

During the 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, downloads of mesh-networking apps spiked, reaching several hundred thousand per day,44 while in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 coup in Myanmar, a single mesh-networking app was downloaded over 1 million times.45

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

VPNs are one of the most effective tools to circumvent partial shutdowns.

By connecting users directly to a remote access point – most often in countries without restrictive censorship policies – before routing traffic on to other services, they allow users to bypass targeted blocking imposed in their area, and conceal their internet use from their local ISP. VPNs achieve this through a process known as tunneling, encrypting the communication between a device and a remote service as it passes back and forth between the VPN provider. While an ISP or others snooping on a network can see that the user is connected to a VPN, all other information about their web use is concealed.

Many VPNs are also configured to use DNS servers provided by the VPN provider themselves, effectively thwarting attempts at DNS tampering that might otherwise connect individuals to insecure servers

As VPNs must route traffic through another server – one often distant from both the origin and destination of internet traffic – they can, however, introduce substantial lags, reducing their usefulness on slow connections. Different VPN providers also offer varying levels of privacy protection, and all traffic can further be exposed to the provider itself. Some countries have further introduced legislation restricting how and whether VPNs can be used.

Although VPNs are legally restricted in some countries, their use around the world is growing rapidly.46 Following the internet shutdown on August 9, 2020, that accompanied Belarus’ national elections, the number of users of a single VPN service in the country jumped from 10,000 to over 1 million in a single day.47

Proxy Servers

Proxy servers function similarly to VPNs, but work at the application rather than the operating system level. Most commonly implemented as a specialized web browser, these applications reroute connections to a remote server through a secure tunnel before passing it on to its destination. Traffic originating from other applications on the same device, however, travels through the user’s ISP as normal, leaving it susceptible to blocking.

Tor, originally developed by researchers at US Defence Department’s DARPA as The Onion Routing project, takes the standard proxying process one step further.

Data sent through the Tor browser is encrypted multiple times, each time receiving a new destination IP address, before leaving a device. That data then bounces across the Tor routers where, one by one, the layers of encryption are peeled back until the fully decrypted data can be forwarded on to its final destination. This structure reduces the risk of any one proxy server being compromised and revealing the contents of web-based communication.

Some websites, including BBC News, are also mirrored directly within the Tor Network, providing greater defense against disruption.48

The Tor Network, however, is blocked in a number of countries and its use may be restricted.

Beyond the spread of tools and services individuals can use to circumvent shutdowns, the underlying technologies of the internet itself are also evolving through the emergence of new standards and protocols, including encrypted DNS and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), to provide greater privacy and security to individuals on the web, simultaneously limiting the tactics that can be used to shut it down.

In the last decade, internet shutdowns have gone from virtually unheard of to an everyday occurrence around the world. To curb this trend, and the havoc it wreaks on individuals and communities, multilateral organizations and popular movements must together play a central role in the fight to keep the internet open and free for all.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has escalated its commitment to ending internet shutdowns in recent months, requesting a full report on the trend by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in July 2021. The Special Rapporteur on the Freedoms of Peaceful Assembly and Association has further called on, “States, international institutions, businesses, and other stakeholders to commit themselves to end internet shutdowns.”49

#KeepItOn

At the grassroots level, #KeepItOn, a global coalition of more than 240 organizations from 105 countries, has been fighting internet shutdowns through a range of creative approaches since 2016. The coalition has engaged in grassroots advocacy, direct policy-maker engagement, technical support, and legal intervention, to end shutdowns and prevent them from taking place in the future.

Legal Action

In the last year, legal action against shutdowns, supported by coalitions including #KeepItOn, has emerged as one of the most effective tools to curtail the use of internet blackouts. A 2020 decision by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Community Court of Justice, a body that holds jurisdiction over 15 states in West Africa, held that a 2017 internet shutdown in Togo violated human rights, and ordered the government to pay restitution and keep the internet on in the future.50 Lawsuits over the last four years have further restored at least some degree of connectivity from Cameroon to Sudan to Kashmir.51 52 53 Even where suits have formally failed, they’ve provided vital transparency on the origins, duration, and impact of shutdowns.

The relatively predictable nature of internet shutdowns – inevitably deployed during elections,or moments of civic unrest – provides further opportunity to head off this threat before it emerges.

“We’ve been working hard to get ahead of the game, and challenge shutdowns before they even take place, rather than picking up the pieces once the damage has been done,” says Access Now’s Felicia Anthonio. “The #KeepItOn coalition is starting to find real success identifying regions at risk of shutdowns, and working with communities to build capacity and bring pressure to bear before the government cuts access or blocks communications platforms.”

The use of internet shutdowns is accelerating at an astonishing pace, plunging ever greater numbers into darkness and threatening to break the promise of a borderless internet. But these recent successes offer more than a glimmer of hope. As global partnerships come together to force this threat into the light, and new technologies develop to keep communities connected, momentum continues to build to secure the future of a free and open internet.

The use of internet shutdowns is accelerating at an astonishing pace, plunging ever greater numbers into darkness and threatening to break the promise of a borderless internet.

But these recent successes offer more than a glimmer of hope.

As global partnerships come together to force this threat into the light, and new technologies develop to keep communities connected, momentum continues to build to secure the future of a free and open internet.

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Kim Zetter, “Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web -- Updated,” Wired, December 19, 2008. https://www.wired.com/2008/12/mediterranean-c/

Jim Cowie, “Egypt Leaves the Internet,” Internet Itelligence (blog), January 27, 2011, https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/egypt-leaves-the-internet-v3

Jan Rydzak, “Disconnected: A Human Rights-Based Approach to Network Disruptions” (Global Network Initiative, May 2018), https://globalnetworkinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Disconnected-Report-Network-Disruptions.pdf

Patrick Kingsley, “Life in an Internet Shutdown: Crossing Borders for Email and Contraband SIM Cards,” The New York Times, September 2, 2019, sec. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/africa/internet-shutdown-economy.html

Okwen Mbah, Miriam Nkangu, and Zak Rogoff, “Don’t Ignore Health-Care Impacts of Internet Shutdowns,” Nature 559, no. 7715 (July 25, 2018): 477–477, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05797-4

Athar Parvaiz, “Kashmir Internet Blackouts Hinder Health Services, Contact Tracing,” Reuters, May 20, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-tech-trfn-idUSKBN22W052

Jason Slotkin, “Parts Of Myanmar Unaware Of COVID-19 Due To Internet Ban, Rights Advocates Say,” NPR, accessed May 24, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/24/882893419/parts-of-myanmar-unaware-of-covid-19-due-to-internet-ban-advocates-say

Samuel Woodhams and Simon Migliano, “The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns,” Top 10 VPN, June 7, 2021, https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/

Darrell M. West, “Internet Shutdowns Cost Countries $2.4 Billion Last Year” (Brookings Institute, October 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/intenet-shutdowns-v-3.pdf

Patrick Kingsley, “Life in an Internet Shutdown: Crossing Borders for Email and Contraband SIM Cards,” The New York Times, September 2, 2019, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/africa/internet-shutdown-economy.html

Admire Mare, “State-Ordered Internet Shutdowns and Digital Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe,” International Journal of Communication, no. 14 (2020): 4244–63

Irene Zih Fon, “Tech Startups Struggle to Regain Business and Boost Morale After Internet Shutdown,” Global Press Journal, October 20, 2017, https://globalpressjournal.com/africa/cameroon/tech-startups-struggle-regain-business-boost-morale-internet-shutdown/

Yarno Ritzen, “Cameroon Internet Shutdowns Cost Anglophones Millions,” Al Jazeera, January 26, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/cameroon-internet-shutdowns-cost-anglophones-millions

Economist Intelligence Unit, “Connecting Learners: Narrowing the Educational Divide,” June 15, 2021, https://connectinglearners.economist.com/connecting-learners/

Kudzayi Savious Tarisayi and Everjoy Munyaradzi, “A Teacher Perspective on the Impact of Internet Shutdown on the Teaching and Learning in High Schools in Zimbabwe,” Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies 3, no. 1 (January 2021): 169–75, https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.230

Axelle Devaux, “Digital Learning Needs to Benefit All Children When Schools Close,” May 4, 2020, https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/05/digital-learning-needs-to-benefit-all-children-when.html

Febriana Firdaus, “Indonesia Said a Broken Cable Caused an Internet Blackout in West Papua. Locals Aren’t Buying It.,” Rest of World, May 20, 2021, https://restofworld.org/2021/west-papua-deliberate-internet-blackout/

Nandita Sengupta, “How Internet Shutdown Has Hurt Students in Kashmir,” The Times of India, January 20, 2020, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/how-internet-shutdown-has-hurt-students-in-kashmir/articleshow/73356950.cms

Nicholas Thomas, “Lessons from the Virtual Front: Tertiary Education in Hong Kong,” CEA Critic 82, no. 3 (2020): 297–300, https://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2020.0025

Nita Bhalla and Alice McCool, “100 Hours in the Dark: How an Election Internet Blackout Hit Poor Ugandans,” Reuters, January 20, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-internet-rights-trfn-idUSKBN29P1V8

“Uganda: Authorities Must Lift Social Media Block amid Crackdown Ahead of Election,” Amnesty International, January 13, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/01/uganda-authorities-must-lift-social-media-block-amid-crackdown-ahead-of-election/

Sarah Myers West, “Research Shows Internet Shutdowns and State Violence Go Hand in Hand in Syria,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 1, 2015, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/research-shows-internet-shutdowns-and-state-violence-go-hand-hand-syria

Amnesty International, “A Web of Impunity: The Killings Iran’s Internet Shutdown Hid,” November 16, 2020, https://iran-shutdown.amnesty.org/

Matthew De Silva, “Hong Kong Protestors Revive Mesh Networks to Preempt Internet Shutdown,” Quartz, September 3, 2019, https://qz.com/1701045/hong-kong-protestors-use-bridgefy-to-preempt-internet-shutdown/

Fanny Potkin and Jessica Pang, “Offline Message App Downloaded over Million Times after Myanmar Coup,” Reuters, February 2, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-politics-bridgefy-idUSKBN2A22H0

Rae Hodge, “VPN Use Surges during the Coronavirus Lockdown, but so Do Security Risks,” CNET, April 23, 2020, https://www.cnet.com/news/vpn-use-surges-during-the-coronavirus-lockdown-but-so-do-security-risks/

Mikhail Bushuev and Martin Kuebler, “In Belarus, Privacy Apps Help Resist Internet Shutdown,” DeutscheWelle, August 17, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/in-belarus-privacy-apps-help-resist-internet-shutdown/a-54560843

“BBC Launches Tor Mirror Site To Thwart Media Censorship,” NPR.org, October 24, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/24/773060596/bbc-launches-tor-mirror-site-to-thwart-media-censorship

United Nations, Human Rights Council,Ending Internet shutdowns: a path forward, A/HRC/47/24/Add.2 (15 June 2021), available from https://undocs.org/A/HRC/47/24/Add.2

Felicia Anthonio et al., “ECOWAS Court Upholds Digital Rights, Rules 2017 Internet Shutdowns in Togo Illegal,” Access Now (blog), June 25, 2020, https://www.accessnow.org/internet-shutdowns-in-togo-illegal/

Media Defence, “Media Defence and Veritas Law Bring Case Before the Constitutional Council of Cameroon Challenging Internet Shutdown,” Media Defence (blog), May 4, 2017, https://www.mediadefence.org/news/mldi-and-veritas-law-bring-case-before-the-constitutional-council-of-cameroon-challenging-internet-shutdown/

Reuters Staff, “Some Internet Service Restored in Sudan after Court Ruling,” Reuters, July 9, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sudan-politics-internet-idUSKCN1U41PN

Swati Bhasin, “2G Mobile Internet Services Restored In Parts Of Jammu And Kashmir,” NDTV.Com, May 12, 2020, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/2g-mobile-internet-services-restored-in-parts-of-jammu-and-kashmir-2227514

References

Jim Cowie, “Egypt Leaves the Internet,” Internet Itelligence (blog), January 27, 2011, https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/egypt-leaves-the-internet-v3

Joel Simon, “Tunisia Must End Censorship on Coverage of Unrest,” January 5, 2011, https://cpj.org/2011/01/tunisia-must-end-censorship-on-coverage-of-unrest/

Christopher Rhoads, Geoffrey A. Fowler, and Chip Cummins, “Iran Cracks Down on Internet Use, Foreign Media,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124519888117821213

Admire Mare, “State-Ordered Internet Shutdowns and Digital Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe,” International Journal of Communication, no. 14 (2020): 4244–63

“Individuals Using the Internet (% of Population) - Guinea,” World Bank, accessed May 21, 2021, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=GN

World Bank, “Individuals Using the Internet (% of Population) - Egypt, Arab Rep.,” n.d., https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=EG

“Reaching for the Kill Switch,” The Economist, February 10, 2011, https://www.economist.com/international/2011/02/10/reaching-for-the-kill-switch

Renai LeMay, “No Internet ‘Kill Switch’ for Australia, Says Conroy,” Delimiter, March 2, 2011, https://delimiter.com.au/2011/02/03/no-internet-kill-switch-for-australia-says-conroy/

Neelie Kroes, “Response to Parliamentary Question P-002322/2011” (2011), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-7-2011-002322-ASW_EN.html

Kyle James, “Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Concerns Voiced in Germany,” DW, March 2, 2011, https://www.dw.com/en/internet-kill-switch-concerns-voiced-in-germany/a-14816106

“The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet,” Pub. L. No. A/HRC/32/L.20 (2016), https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adopted.pdf

Deji Bryce Olukotun, “Internet Shutdowns – an Explainer,” Deutsche Welle, December 12, 2016, https://www.dw.com/en/internet-shutdowns-an-explainer/a-36731481

Berhan Taye et al., “Internet Shutdown News and Report: A Year in the Fight to #KeepItOn,” Access Now (blog), March 3, 2021, https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton-report-a-year-in-the-fight/

Christopher Giles and Peter Mwai, “Africa Internet: Where and How Are Governments Blocking It?,” BBC News, January 14, 2021, sec. Africa, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47734843

Samuel Woodhams and Simon Migliano, “The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns,” Top 10 VPN, June 7, 2021, https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/

“Severed Cables Disrupt Internet,” BBC News, January 31, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7218008.stm

Kim Zetter, “Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web -- Updated,” Wired, December 19, 2008. https://www.wired.com/2008/12/mediterranean-c/

Jim Cowie, “Egypt Leaves the Internet,” Internet Itelligence (blog), January 27, 2011, https://blogs.oracle.com/internetintelligence/egypt-leaves-the-internet-v3

Okwen Mbah, Miriam Nkangu, and Zak Rogoff, “Don’t Ignore Health-Care Impacts of Internet Shutdowns,” Nature 559, no. 7715 (July 25, 2018): 477–477, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05797-4

Athar Parvaiz, “Kashmir Internet Blackouts Hinder Health Services, Contact Tracing,” Reuters, May 20, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-tech-trfn-idUSKBN22W052

Samuel Woodhams and Simon Migliano, “The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns,” Top 10 VPN, June 7, 2021, https://www.top10vpn.com/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/

Darrell M. West, “Internet Shutdowns Cost Countries $2.4 Billion Last Year” (Brookings Institute, October 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/intenet-shutdowns-v-3.pdf

Admire Mare, “State-Ordered Internet Shutdowns and Digital Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe,” International Journal of Communication, no. 14 (2020): 4244–63

Yarno Ritzen, “Cameroon Internet Shutdowns Cost Anglophones Millions,” Al Jazeera, January 26, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/1/26/cameroon-internet-shutdowns-cost-anglophones-millions

Economist Intelligence Unit, “Connecting Learners: Narrowing the Educational Divide,” June 15, 2021, https://connectinglearners.economist.com/connecting-learners/

Axelle Devaux, “Digital Learning Needs to Benefit All Children When Schools Close,” May 4, 2020, https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/05/digital-learning-needs-to-benefit-all-children-when.html

Nicholas Thomas, “Lessons from the Virtual Front: Tertiary Education in Hong Kong,” CEA Critic 82, no. 3 (2020): 297–300, https://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2020.0025

Amnesty International, “A Web of Impunity: The Killings Iran’s Internet Shutdown Hid,” November 16, 2020, https://iran-shutdown.amnesty.org/

“BBC Launches Tor Mirror Site To Thwart Media Censorship,” NPR.org, October 24, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/24/773060596/bbc-launches-tor-mirror-site-to-thwart-media-censorship

United Nations, Human Rights Council,Ending Internet shutdowns: a path forward, A/HRC/47/24/Add.2 (15 June 2021), available from https://undocs.org/A/HRC/47/24/Add.2

Reuters Staff, “Some Internet Service Restored in Sudan after Court Ruling,” Reuters, July 9, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sudan-politics-internet-idUSKCN1U41PN

No. 004

The Internet Shutdowns Issue

About this issue

The Problem

At 12:34 p.m. local time on January 28, 2011, the lights went out in Egypt.

Shutting Off the Lights

The internet is not a single network, but a network of networks.

Shutdowns — both full and partial — are implemented through local ISPs using six primary methods:

Throttling

IP Blocking

Mobile Data Shutoffs

DNS Interference

Server Name Identification Blocking

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)

A Gathering Dark

United States

Ecuador

Togo

Sudan

Papua and West Papua, Indonesia

Myanmar

New Perspectives

Voices From the Dark

Wegene

Mohammed

Jameel

Benjamin

Pino

Daisy

Endangering Lives

Immobilizing Economies

Obstructing Educations

Silencing Dissent

Countermeasures

Expose

Tracking Outages

Measuring the Cost

Mitigate

Mesh Networks

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

Proxy Servers

Prevent

#KeepItOn

Legal Action

References

Wegene, 34Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mohammed, 46Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

Jameel, 16Baghdad, Iraq

Benjamin, 34Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo

Pino, 36Tororo, Uganda

Daisy, 30Kampala, Uganda

References

Wegene, 34
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mohammed, 46
Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh

Jameel, 16
Baghdad, Iraq

Benjamin, 34
Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo

Pino, 36
Tororo, Uganda

Daisy, 30
Kampala, Uganda