How Governments Flip the Web Right into a Weapon

For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite tv for pc failed; no cable was minimize. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban authorities. It adopted a extra localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to stop immoral actions.” No further rationalization was given. The timing couldn’t have been worse: communities nonetheless reeling from a significant earthquake lost emergency communications, flights were grounded, and banking was interrupted.

Afghanistan’s blackout is a part of a wider sample. Simply because the finish of September, there have been additionally main nationwide web shutdowns in Tanzania and Cameroon, and vital regional shutdowns in Pakistan and Nigeria. In all circumstances however one, authorities supplied no official justification or acknowledgment, leaving thousands and thousands unable to entry data, contact family members, or specific themselves by moments of disaster, elections, and protests.

The frequency of deliberate web shutdowns has skyrocketed because the first notable instance in Egypt in 2011. Along with our colleagues on the digital rights organisation Entry Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, we’ve tracked 296 deliberate web shutdowns in 54 international locations in 2024, and at the least 244 extra in 2025 to date. 

That is greater than an inconvenience. The web has develop into a necessary piece of infrastructure, affecting how we reside, work, and get our data. It’s additionally a major enabler of human rights, and turning off the web can worsen or conceal a spectrum of abuses. These shutdowns silence societies, and so they’re getting increasingly widespread.

Shutdowns will be native or nationwide, partial or complete. In complete blackouts, like Afghanistan or Tanzania, nothing works. However shutdowns are sometimes focused extra granularly. Cellphone web may very well be blocked, however not broadband. Particular information websites, social media platforms, and messaging methods may very well be blocked, leaving general community entry unaffected—as when Brazil shut off X (previously Twitter) in 2024. Generally bandwidth is simply throttled, making all the pieces slower and unreliable.

Generally, web shutdowns are utilized in political or army operations. In recent times, Russia and Ukraine have shut off components of one another’s web, and Israel has repeatedly shut off Palestinians’ web in Gaza. Shutdowns of this kind occurred 25 times in 2024, affecting folks in 13 international locations.

Causes for the shutdowns are as various because the international locations that perpetrate them. Common data management is only one. Shutdowns typically are available response to political unrest, as governments attempt to stop folks from organizing and getting data; Panama had a regional shutdown this summer season in response to protests. Or throughout elections, as opposition events make the most of the web to mobilize supporters and talk technique. Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenko, who has dominated since 1994, reportedly disabled the web during elections earlier this 12 months, following a similar move in 2020. However they will also be extra banal. Entry Now documented international locations disabling components of the web throughout student exam periods at the least 16 occasions in 2024, together with Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, and India.

Iran’s shutdowns in 2022 and June of this 12 months are good examples of a extremely refined effort, with layers of shutdowns that find yourself forcing folks off the worldwide web and onto Iran’s surveilled, censored nationwide intranet. India, in the meantime, has been the world shutdown chief for a few years, with 855 distinct incidents. Myanmar is second with 149, adopted by Pakistan after which Iran. All of this data is offered on Entry Now’s digital dashboard, the place you possibly can see breakdowns by area, nation, sort, geographic extent, and time.

There was a slight decline in shutdowns in the course of the early years of the pandemic, however they’ve elevated sharply since then. The explanations are various, however lots will be attributed to the rise in protest actions associated to financial hardship and corruption, and common democratic backsliding and instability. In lots of international locations at the moment, shutdowns are a knee-jerk response to any type of unrest or protest, irrespective of how small.

A rustic’s capacity to close down the web relies upon lots on its infrastructure. Within the US, for instance, shutdowns could be arduous to implement. As we noticed when discussions a couple of potential TikTok ban ramped up two years in the past, the complicated and multifaceted nature of our web makes it very troublesome to realize. Nevertheless, as we’ve seen with complete nationwide shutdowns around the globe, the ripple results in all points of life are immense. (Bear in mind the consequences of only a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computer systems and cancelled 2,200 flights within the US alone?)

The extra centralized the web infrastructure, the simpler it’s to implement a shutdown. If a rustic has only one cellphone supplier, or solely two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the remainder of the world, shutting them down is easy.

Shutdowns will not be solely extra widespread, however they’ve additionally develop into extra dangerous. Not like in years previous, when the web was a pleasant choice to have, or maybe when web penetration charges had been considerably decrease throughout the International South, at the moment the web is a necessary piece of societal infrastructure for the majority of the world’s inhabitants.

Entry Now has lengthy maintained that denying folks entry to the web is a human rights violation, and has collected harrowing tales from locations like Tigray in Ethiopia, Uganda, Annobon in Equatorial Guinea, and Iran. The web is a necessary software for a spectrum of rights, together with freedom of expression and meeting. Shutdowns make documenting ongoing human rights abuses and atrocities tougher or unimaginable. They’re additionally impactful on folks’s day by day lives, enterprise, healthcare, training, funds, safety, and security, relying on the context. Shutdowns in battle zones are notably damaging, as they impression the flexibility of humanitarian actors to ship assist and make it tougher for folks to seek out secure evacuation routes and civilian corridors.

Defenses on the bottom are slim. Relying on the nation and the kind of shutdown, there will be workarounds. All the things, from VPNs to mesh networks to Starlink terminals to international SIM playing cards close to borders, has been used with various levels of success. The tech-savvy generally produce other choices. However for many everybody in society, no web means no web—and all the consequences of that loss.

The worldwide group performs an vital position in shaping how web shutdowns are understood and addressed. World our bodies have recognized that dependable web entry is a necessary service, and will put extra strain on governments to maintain the web on in conflict-affected areas. However whereas worldwide condemnation has labored in some circumstances (Mauritius and South Sudan are two current examples), international locations appear to be studying from one another, leading to each extra shutdowns and new international locations perpetrating them.

There’s nonetheless time to reverse the pattern, if that’s what we wish to do. Finally, the query comes down as to whether or not governments will enshrine each a proper to entry data and freedom of expression in regulation and in follow. Retaining the web on is a norm, however the trajectory from a single web shutdown in 2011 to 2,000 blackouts 15 years later demonstrates how embedded the follow has develop into. The implications of that shift are nonetheless unfolding, however they attain far past the second the display goes darkish.

Bruce Schneier is a cybersecurity lecturer on the Harvard Kennedy College and a board member of the digital rights group Entry Now. Zach Rosson is the #KeepItOn world knowledge and analysis lead at Entry Now.