Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing couldn’t have been worse: communities still reeling from a major earthquake lost emergency communications, flights were grounded, and banking was interrupted. Afghanistan’s blackout is part of a wider pattern. Just since the end of September, there were also major nationwide internet shutdowns in Tanzania and Cameroon, and significant regional shutdowns in Pakistan and Nigeria. In all cases but one, authorities offered no official justification or acknowledgment, leaving millions unable to access information, contact loved ones, or express themselves through moments of crisis, elections, and protests.
The frequency of deliberate internet shutdowns has skyrocketed since the first notable example in Egypt in 2011. Together with our colleagues at the digital rights organisation Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, we’ve tracked 296 deliberate internet shutdowns in 54 countries in 2024, and at least 244 more in 2025 so far.
This is more than an inconvenience. The internet has become an essential piece of infrastructure, affecting how we live, work, and get our information. It’s also a major enabler of human rights, and turning off the internet can worsen or conceal a spectrum of abuses. These shutdowns silence societies, and they’re getting more and more common.
Shutdowns can be local or national, partial or total. In total blackouts, like Afghanistan or Tanzania, nothing works. But shutdowns are often targeted more granularly. Cellphone internet could be blocked, but not broadband. Specific news sites, social media platforms, and messaging systems could be blocked, leaving overall network access unaffected—as when Brazil shut off X (formerly Twitter) in 2024. Sometimes bandwidth is just throttled, making everything slower and unreliable.
Sometimes, internet shutdowns are used in political or military operations. In recent years, Russia and Ukraine have shut off parts of each other’s internet, and Israel has repeatedly shut off Palestinians’ internet in Gaza. Shutdowns of this type happened 25 times in 2024, affecting people in 13 countries.
Reasons for the shutdowns are as varied as the countries that perpetrate them. General information control is just one. Shutdowns often come in response to political unrest, as governments try to prevent people from organizing and getting information; Panama had a regional shutdown this summer in response to protests. Or during elections, as opposition parties utilize the internet to mobilize supporters and communicate strategy. Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994, reportedly disabled the internet during elections earlier this year, following a similar move in 2020. But they can also be more banal. Access Now documented countries disabling parts of the internet during student exam periods at least 16 times in 2024, including Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, and India.
Iran’s shutdowns in 2022 and June of this year are good examples of a highly sophisticated effort, with layers of shutdowns that end up forcing people off the global internet and onto Iran’s surveilled, censored national intranet. India, meanwhile, has been the world shutdown leader for many years, with 855 distinct incidents. Myanmar is second with 149, followed by Pakistan and then Iran. All of this information is available on Access Now’s digital dashboard, where you can see breakdowns by region, country, type, geographic extent, and time.
There was a slight decline in shutdowns during the early years of the pandemic, but they have increased sharply since then. The reasons are varied, but a lot can be attributed to the rise in protest movements related to economic hardship and corruption, and general democratic backsliding and instability. In many countries today, shutdowns are a knee-jerk response to any form of unrest or protest, no matter how small.
A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?)
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