This article was originally published on the Internet Society’s blog. With protests intensifying and social media interruptions reported in the weeks leading up to Benin’s presidential elections on 11 April 2021, many Internet and civil rights organizations were growing nervous about the potential for another Internet shutdown. Internet access was cut for almost 24 hours […]

Several governments around the world turn to limiting or shutting down access to the Internet as an easy solution to quell potential local problems. In the past few years, we’ve noticed that Internet shutdowns occur around periods of local unrest, elections, or national school/university exams. We have also noticed that shutdowns rarely serve their purpose […]

This article was first published on the Internet Society blog. The Indian government’s recent Internet shutdown during farmer protests impacted over 50 million residents. It is a stark warning of the danger of tampering with the foundations that make the Internet work for everyone. Internet shutdowns are a dangerous tactic increasingly used by the state to quell situations […]

On 13 January, ahead of the Ugandan 2021 General Elections, our data sources began showing evidence of Internet disruption in Uganda signaling that a wide scale outage was underway. Over 17.5 million Internet subscribers in the country and countless business, services and educational institutions were affected.     Prior to the shutdown, Reuters,  NYTimes, and AccessNow had […]

One of the indicators we provide as part of our Insights platform is the economic cost of shutdowns. In our data, we rely on a tool developed with Netblocks.org, the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST). The COST builds upon indicators from the World Bank, ITU, Eurostat and U.S. Census to estimate the economic impact of […]