Following a contested presidential election in Mauritania, an Internet shutdown was put into place at approximately 15:30 GMT on June 25 as seen in the CAIDA IODA figure below – a significant drop in routed network prefixes occurred for several hours, while Active Probing and Darknet traffic sources dropped significantly.

Network diversity within the country is extremely limited. Looking at the figure for AS29544 (Mauritanian Telecommunication Company) below, it is clear that the routing instability in the country-level graph is related to this network’s routes essentially being removed from the Internet for that multi-hour period. Internet connectivity began to return across the country on July 3.