An in-depth look at how governments in 60+ countries have enacted 935+ internet blackouts since 2016 to control populations and silence dissent
Seven years, 60 countries, 935 internet shutdowns: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent. — PROLOGUE — Special operation and peace Tweets: @lvandenassum , @aymanm , @violazhouyi , @dfrlab , @robinsonbkk , and @noalsilencio Tweets: @lvandenassum : Since Myanmar's military seized power in its 2021 coup, “it has routinely disrupted access across the country.” These blackouts have had devastating effects on political & socio-economic rights as reported by @NuNuLusan & @EmilyFishbein11 https://restofworld.org/... Ayman / @aymanm : The biggest threat to free speech is not Elon Musk buying Twitter, it's authoritarian governments shutting down the internet to quell protests in their countries. In 7 years, 60 countries have shut down the internet 935 times. Stay Focused https://restofworld.org/... Viola Zhou / @violazhouyi : China's expensive censorship model is hard to replicate, so other authoritarian governments simply switch off the internet to quell dissent. Check out @restofworld's investigation into internet blackouts around the world. Spearheaded by @PeterGuest https://twitter.com/... @dfrlab : Government blackouts are one tool in the authoritarian toolbox to suppress protests and the fight for human rights around the globe. Check out @restofworld's incredible (and beautifully designed) work on internet blackouts from the Arab Spring to Russian censors. https://twitter.com/... Gwen Robinson / @robinsonbkk : An important and well-reported piece: “.. in areas without access to the internet, some incidents may not be documented at all... The level of atrocities that have gone unspoken in Myanmar have been quite shocking for us.” https://twitter.com/... @noalsilencio : If, say, China asks it to censor anti-Chinese tweets for Tesla to be able to keep making and selling cars there, would Musk carve and why is everyone so surprised he would? https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Rest of World's 60-country, 935-shutdown tally caps a documented escalation: reporting on Cameroon, Gambia, and the Republic of Congo in early 2017 marked sub-Saharan Africa as the proving ground, and by 2019 a watchdog counted 196 shutdowns across 25 countries in 2018 alone — up from 75 in 2016. The Verge's count of roughly 850 blocks over the past decade, peaking at 213 in 2019, showed the practice had become routine rather than exceptional.
What the new piece adds is the mechanism and the human cost: Myanmar's post-coup military joins Indonesia among governments that now treat the off switch as a standing tool, while the Sudan 2019 shutdown showed the control point sits with telecom engineers as much as with the state. The relationships note that China's expensive censorship model is hard to replicate — which is precisely why the cheap, blunt blackout has spread instead.
First-order effects
- Populations under blackout — most acutely in Myanmar since the 2021 coup — lose political and socio-economic rights in real time: commerce, communication, and documentation of abuses all stop when access does.
- Telecom operators in shutdown-prone countries are cast as the enforcement layer, ordered to cut access on government instruction, with Sudan's 2019 episode showing engineers are the last hands on the switch.
Second-order effects
- The blackout playbook is diffusing across regions — from the 2017 African cases to Southeast Asia — so protest response in one country now normalizes the tactic for its neighbors, and telecom firms face a patchwork of shutdown orders as a recurring operating cost.
- Because China's filtering model is too costly for most regimes to copy, demand concentrates on simpler kill-switch techniques, pushing vendors and operators toward infrastructure that can be switched off wholesale.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory from 75 shutdowns in 2016 to 935+ since holds, the off switch becomes a default instrument of state control — shifting the battleground for dissent from content moderation to the physical layer of connectivity, where engineers and operators become the decisive actors.
- The gap between China's sophisticated, costly censorship and the blunt shutdowns most governments actually adopt points to a two-tier digital authoritarianism: one exportable model of total filtering, and a cheaper global norm of episodic darkness.
The trend: Internet connectivity is hardening from shared infrastructure into an instrument of statecraft, with the cheap, replicable shutdown — not China's expensive filtering model — becoming the default tool for silencing dissent.