Internet Shutdowns Are on the Rise Worldwide With Serious Human Costs
Pino was organizing audio for a radio show on a Wednesday night in January, when he realized his internet wasn’t working. He assessed what could be wrong, troubleshot all possibilities, but nothing seemed immediately amiss. He called a friend.
“I almost fell out of my chair,” Pino, 36, says of what his friend told him: the government of Uganda, where Pino lives and works as an advocate for digital literacy and spaces for women and girls, had shut down the internet hours before an election that would send President Yoweri Museveni back to office for a sixth term. Internet watchdog NetBlocks described the event as a “nation-scale internet blackout.” Museveni said it was in response to Facebook taking sides against the ruling party.
“It was devastating. I felt like a piece of me had been cut off,” Pino says.
The pandemic lockdown added another communication barrier, as Ugandans couldn’t travel to Kenya to access the internet. “It was as if I was on an island all alone. I couldn’t reach out to anyone else.”
Pino is one of six personal stories we gathered from around the world for the fourth issue of The Current, with this issue focusing on government-imposed internet shutdowns. There is now rarely a day when at least one part of the world is not experiencing some form of internet shutdown. What was once a seemingly isolated problem has exploded as governments around the world use internet shutdowns as a means to silence dissent and stifle democratic participation.
For the issue, Jigsaw explores the human cost behind these internet shutdowns, and offers a roadmap to help protect people against the resulting disruptions, which affect health, education, journalism, business, and political participation.
While the number of shutdowns dropped from 2019 to 2020, the duration of certain, often narrower types of shutdowns are getting longer. In Uganda, for example, the full-internet shutdown in January lasted five days. But at the time of the publication of this report, Facebook remains blocked.
In Nigeria, officials announced in June that the government would block access to Twitter indefinitely after the platform froze the account of President Muhammadu Buhari for violating its abusive behavior policy. In July, Iran implemented regional shutdowns as protests broke out over what authorities described as severe droughts in Khuzestan Province. Cuba’s government was also suspected of cutting off internet access during anti-government protests this summer. Most recently, the Taliban shut down the internet in Afghanistan’s Panjshir valley allegedly to block Afghans from reading former Vice President Amrullah Saleh’s Twitter posts.
Experts say these online blockades do more than stifle free expression. Businesses in Nigeria
that use Twitter for marketing and customer service lost a key piece of communications infrastructure, with damage rippling across the entire economy. Journalists in Iran said that targeted internet shutdowns in July hindered basic news gathering.
Nigeria’s Twitter ban alone affects more than 100 million social media users and has cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars and counting, according to a British firm, Top10VPN, using an economic impact calculator co-developed and hosted by the global internet monitoring group NetBlocks. With no end in sight, Nigeria’s ban has also sent Internet users scrambling for workarounds: Downloads of VPNs in Nigeria surged more than 1,400 percent the day after the shutdown, Top10VPN reported.
In drought-stricken Iran, the latest Internet shutdowns were an unsettling reminder that cutting off communications to the outside world leaves a country’s population more vulnerable to state violence and anti-protest crackdowns such as the “November Massacre” in Iran in 2019 that left more than 300 people dead, according to Amnesty International.
It’s vital that societies have the capacity to identify where internet access is being curtailed, and the technological means to counter shutdowns while supporting connected global movements that drive change. In this issue, Jigsaw explores various countermeasures to combat internet shutdowns. Documents, like Google’s Transparency Report, help to expose the problem and report real-time known disruptions to Google products. Tools like Outline — an open source VPN software — and Intra, which prevent DNS manipulation attacks, make it easier for anyone to access the free and open internet. Grassroots initiatives, like Access Now’s #KeepItOn campaign, lean into direct policy-maker engagement, technical support, and legal intervention, to end shutdowns and prevent them from taking place in the future.
“Losing access to the internet can seem like a trivial thing,” said Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Venezuelan lawyer, digital rights activist, and #KeepItOn fellow with Access Now. “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.”
Monitoring and documenting internet shutdowns is a critical first step to addressing this issue on a global scale, but technology is only one part of the solution. The United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and NATO all provide possible channels for increasing international support for restrictions on governments that shut down the internet. The world’s most technologically advanced democracies are also beginning to formalize their multilateral coordination on technology issues. While there’s more work to be done, the recent successes and the rallying cry from these global partnerships offer hope in securing a free and open internet.
Read more in The Current: The Internet Shutdowns Issue.
