Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/09/internet-shutdowns-record-high-africa-2024-access-weaponised

by adrian_mrd • 1 year ago

289 255 1 year ago

Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.

Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought

somedude895• 1 year ago

That sounds insane! Do you have a source?

joey_spaztard• 1 year ago

https://torrentfreak.com/laliga-blocks-cloudflare-again-new-...

oefrha3• 1 year ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157000

briandear• 1 year ago

I have Starlink and it doesn’t seem to be affected in Spain, but I could be wrong. I just haven’t noticed it.

nextts3• 1 year ago

Why would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.

12700180802• 1 year ago

That's still just giving a different corporation the power to control communications

mixermachine• 1 year ago

Truly a case where VPNs do make sense.

throwaway8943454• 1 year ago

If they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.

VHRanger• 1 year ago

VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.

Apart from something like starlink and even then they're not playing nice with geographical access most of the time based on politics, whims of a narcissist, or just business.

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

I'm beginning to think Europe needs to just dry out from soccer for a year or two.

Like, we're impacting communications now.

globular-toast4• 1 year ago

Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.

api2• 1 year ago

People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans.

When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.

kiney2• 1 year ago

the problem here isn't football. It's rampant censoreship and net blocks in the EU. (same problem different methods in other EU countries. In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)

seydor• 1 year ago

it s not such a massive thing as it used to

but football teams often have political connections and thus easy access to do such things

crest• 1 year ago

Maybe DDoS their fax machines? "Toner or paper is empty!!!", white on black, 999 copies. sigh

dylan6043• 1 year ago

Did anyone actually ever attempt the faxing a piece of black construction paper on an old sheet fed fax machine where you tape the top to the bottom prank? Was that even possible, or just urban legend?

wkat4242• 1 year ago

Huh? I live in Spain and I've never had any issues with internet or any websites being cut off. I'm not sure when these matches are on though because I'm not interested in sports.

Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.

flkenosad• 1 year ago

Spain could build thier own cloudflare.

basisword• 1 year ago

Thought you must be exaggerating but after reading further I’m shocked. I know the courts can be a tech illiterate but why are the Spanish courts this bad? Surely they see the consequences of the decision and immediately realise it’s stupid? The UK can be pretty bad with this stuff and the Premier League is huge but I have no concern of something this idiotic happening here.

phmagic• 1 year ago

What are the best ways for citizens to get their own p2p internet going?

theodric• 1 year ago

DIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.

nradov2• 1 year ago

Have WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.

nextts3• 1 year ago

AM radio?

Even FM walkie talkies as a start.

spacebanana73• 1 year ago

Not exactly P2P, but I think the fibre optic drones used in Russia/Ukraine could be effective for regaining internet access in Africa.

Those drones have 10km+ fibre optic cables stringing out the back. Fly it to a different country, hook up to a friendly wifi/cellular network, then pipe your general purpose internet traffic through the fibre optic cable.

This wouldn't work everywhere. But for small Africa countries with lots of land borders it might work. Especially if the border area had jungle or other low traffic terrain.

registeredcorn• 1 year ago

"Internet is a little flaky today. Probably a bird perching on the fiber."

dingnuts3• 1 year ago

the Internet Protocol, IP, is already peer to peer. Assign yourself an address (V6) and get a peer, assign them an address, plug in a cable, voila!

Get a switch and another computer and you have an Internet. Ok, we would generally call it an "intranet," but that's because -the- Internet with a capital I is specifically a net of intranets.

So, if you were to start an ISP, which is the proposal, you would buy an uplink to the rest of the Internet for your intranet that you just built, from another ISP or backbone provider.

But you don't have to do that, you could partner with another intranet, and have a separate Net. Similar to what happens in China actually.

My point is: the Internet is already peer to peer. You just have to use the technology. Thirty years ago every tech nerd knew how to start an ISP.

The only reason individuals don't do it as much anymore is because we want the ISP to lay dedicated cable for our connections, rather than just using the phone lines, and laying cable is really expensive.

But you could use phone or amateur radio (like the JS8 digital mode) if lower speeds are acceptable, or lay your own Ethernet or fiber if you're capable.

The only thing that makes today's Internet seem like it's not peer to peer is the investment needed to start an ISP with the performance modern consumers expect

nostrademons• 1 year ago

IP is P2P, but a lot of the layers built on top of it are centralized, and very vulnerable to attack. DNS is hierarchical with 13 root name servers. Google is a private company, but if websearch ever goes offline, the utility of the Internet decreases dramatically. Some stupid percentage of webhosts are protected by Cloudflare; Cloudflare outages have taken large portions of the Internet offline. Same with AWS on the backend; when AWS has gone down, people find that a large number of the websites they depend upon go down too. Most people's consumer IPs are blocked off from the public Internet by their ISP and NAT.

Actually using an Internet based on IP addresses alone is ridiculously difficult. Quick, tell me how the IP protocol works using IP addresses alone! You can't type anything other than IP addresses into the address bar of your computer, and your browser can't make any secondary requests unless they're to a raw IP address. No using Google or Wikipedia unless you have their IP addresses memorized and have HOST file entries for all the secondary resources they request. You can't use HN to tell me; you need to find my computer's IP address and SSH in to me. Oh, and whatever certificate validation SSH does can't make any network requests to a DNS entry.

bombcar2• 1 year ago

The way to do p2p communication without the Internet is to remove immediacy from it.

Old email servers were configured this way, they’d try to communicate the next time they got a connection.

For text it could be simple as encrypting and sending it to as many devices as you see until you get an ack back - something almost blockchain-like, but without the CPU and just signing.

Ack’d messages would be purged from ThePile and you could also expire them after a time. It’d be a few gigabytes perhaps, and could share diffs when you see another device.

sgt• 1 year ago

FIDONet was pretty rugged that way.

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

No internet here, but I'm setting up Meshtastic nodes between me and my family so we can keep messaging when internet stops working, or power goes out (solar panels).

They'll get 99.99% of people, but not me. I only need it for an hour or so to communicate meeting points. After that it's an added luxury for whatever comes after. It's my contribution to the prepping of my family.

int_19h2• 1 year ago

Look up AREDN.

junaru• 1 year ago

Given how internet exploited and divided people in the west i don't blame them. Ignorance is bliss and i want it back.

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

What? They don't block Internet because they want their people united. They do it because they are authoritarians who want to control every aspect of people's lives. India doesn't top the list of countries that cut Internet access because it's a haven of national unity, lol. It's probably a country more divided than any Western ones.

ty68536• 1 year ago

The irony here is the government has little grip in much of central Africa. Militias roam the bush with little fear of law. Places like CAR are nations only because europeans drew it like that on a map. Killing the internet may be the only lever of control for the central government, they cannot control people's lives to nearly the extent is done in most the west.

In places like the US they can just use one of the gazillion laws on the books to charge anyone, then send the police on any corner to get them. There is no need to kill the internet.

gimme_treefiddy2• 1 year ago

Lets peek into whether those divisions are organic or driven through NGOs.

mywittyname3• 1 year ago

"Keep the bad parts, eliminate the good parts."

- The Authoritarian Cookbook

mystified5016• 1 year ago

Libraries are bad and should be banned because you might find Mein Kampf in the nonfiction section

gimme_treefiddy2• 1 year ago

Note how almost no one will acknowledge this is happening in the backdrop of unravelling of USAID and how certain powers in the world sow discord in other countries.

I have done a complete 180 on this issue in recent years.

hello_computer2• 1 year ago

I blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.

Acrobatic_Road• 1 year ago

what are you using to block entire geographical regions?

hello_computer2• 1 year ago

it’s a secret

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

Apps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether.

The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.

api2• 1 year ago

Most of our tech has been developed in stable advanced developed countries.

ironmagma• 1 year ago

stable

I wouldn't be too certain about that.

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

It would be fun to develop some kind of war games scenario where we see what we can make work in a less stable environment and make changes accordingly. Some kind of apocalypse conference or somesuch.

I mean we'll be doing the work eventually, might as well get a head start in-game.

sofixa• 1 year ago

But if the app doesn't have internet access, how would it discover the others on that same partition? (Assuming it's a wholesale internet/specific domains being fully blocked). If your phone/computer can't contact Telegram's servers, it doesn't matter.

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

I imagine using bluetooth for peer discovery, so you find peers by sharing an elevator with them, or stopping at the same intersection, standing in line at the grocery store etc. Although the network would probably never converge entirely, it would drift approximately towards convergence as long as the gossiped dataset stayed small.

The gossiped data would be:

My public key is ABCD1234... and the most recent CID of my data is DCBA9876...

These devices need be on no other network at the time, just in range of each other.

At other times when they're near a node on the larger network they offload their discovered peers and the consult their trust graph to see which peers (new or already known) are both trusted in some capacity (maybe transitively) and interested in the same topics/apps. In those cases, that data syncs to their mobile device, and apps which reference it update.

This would work better if you dedicate some device somewhere to be permanently attached to a network node, but unlike what we're doing today there's no need for it to be maintained by the author of your apps. We can decouple those personas. If the device hosting your data ends up on another partition, you can dedicate a new device to the task without updating anyone, since nobody is hanging onto device identifiers anyway. Probably this just means leaving yesteryear's busted phone plugged in at home so it can be a cache for your data while the device in your pocket is offline. Your mobile device an update when it gets on the wifi.

So now you've got users carrying around data which other users might be interested in (beyond the peer-finding data), and it's organized by topic/app, so when two peers are nearby which share an interest (perhaps on the behalf of their peers, transitively), they can directly sync heavier data as well. I think that attaching a wifi router to every delivery truck would get you most of the way there, since it could move the data between houses it's delivering to.

This might mean network latencies measured in hours or days, which would be awkward, but at least it's never hard down because it never depends on the state of a unique server. Besides, if the partition-tolerant fallback works beyond a certain usability threshold then you've removed the incentive to disable the internet in the first place.

Maybe I don't have the details perfect, but something like this is possible and I don't think the difficult part is getting the underlying protocol right. Rather it's getting the apps we rely on to also work under the fallback paradigm. The necessary shift is to get away from request/response architectures and towards pub/sub ones. Fewer unique server identifiers and more trusted user keys and predicates about the degree to which those users trust different content hashes.

m30473• 1 year ago

By making its own "internet in a box": open wifi, DHCP and DNS, and Bob's your uncle. Anybody in range can play; everyone else is out of luck. Install NNTP so that news can move around by flooding, as nodes form new associations. Add a second wifi transceiver and some clever dynamic route discovery and you have a mesh network.

m30473• 1 year ago

I made a wifi firing range / disconnected collab environment to this end a few years ago. Has BIND (which takes over the world), Apache, DAV, Etherpad. I carry a VM of it around on my laptop "against the day".

__MatrixMan__4• 1 year ago

Thats a cool idea. Instead of initializing our hard disks with 0's we should fill them with things like that so that people have a chance of finding them as needed.

Does it have a corresponding repo or blog post or anything like that?

callc• 1 year ago

I agree, but also am weary trying to solve societal issues with technical solutions. We naturally try to do this, using the tools we know. It’s a losing battle to fight technologically against a motivated state actor, like CCP. When your door gets knocked down and you get arrested for using e2e encrypted communications, technology will not save you.

Certainly things like SSL and encryption have helped fight back against the spying eyes of governments and bad actors.

This is not a dig against making apps robust to network partitions

folmar• 1 year ago

Briar does just that

foundart• 1 year ago

This? https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Hadn’t heard of it. Thanks for bringing it up.

matt3210• 1 year ago

Some might say the other countries should stay out of it. For example people might say Switzerland should stay out of those nations issues. However, if Switzerland provided technology thought a normal market or not, to the rulers, they have already interfered with the natural progression of that nation. There is no hope of the people making the situation better while Switzerland is providing the rulers with tech and they're keeping it from the people.

fluoridation5• 1 year ago

That's like saying that because the store sold you the belt you're using to beat your children, the owners should break into your house to physically stop you from doing so.

GuinansEyebrows• 1 year ago

Individuals looking for belts and nation-states looking for networking equipment are not really the same thing… also belts don’t usually include service/maintenance contracts etc, or the ability to be revoked from the public at large (imagine the embarrassment)

dingnuts3• 1 year ago

lots of people think gun manufacturers should be liable if the customer shoots someone so it's not like this is an argument without precedent

rbanffy9• 1 year ago

Is the US still providing updates and spares for Ukraine’s airforce? Modern military aircraft depend a lot on software updates to stay operational.

4b11b4• 1 year ago

This should be an extremely high profile piece of news...

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..

alephnerd3• 1 year ago

In most countries, "curfews" are viewed as a justified legal construct. In most cases, internet shutdowns are clubbed with general curfews as well.

You see this especially in most of the former British colonies listed that continue to use British Colonial Era legislation for Law and Order. You see this is South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar), and much of Africa (eg. Nigeria, Kenya) as well

It's the classic "collectivist" versus "individualist" split, and it's something only individual countries can decide.

bilbo0s4• 1 year ago

Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?

The issue is that no one would care.

There are children being sold into sexual slavery and you don't get that kind of reaction. You're definitely not going to get it because some random InstaSnapTwit in Nigeria can't get his fart app to work.

oefrha3• 1 year ago

Did you hear about hundreds of thousands of people dying in South Sudan’s civil war since 2013? Did you hear about the return of open-air slave markets in Libya since NATO intervention in 2011? Did you hear about dozens of other hideous things happening in Africa? It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

pc864• 1 year ago

These things have been reported hundreds / thousands of time if you read enough news to get informed of them. That's the only reason you know about them. There's no reason for a random local news station in rural Oklahoma to cover the South Sudan's civil war or Libyan slave markets.

That war and slavery are bad doesn't make the curtailing of civil rights for millions of people suddenly a nothingburger.

notavalleyman• 1 year ago

Wagner* and russia's Libya intervention to continuously arm and support general khalifa haftar against the internationally recognised government

LAC-Tech• 1 year ago

I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.

I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.

ForTheKidz• 1 year ago

It’s almost comical that you think people elsewhere would give a shit about such a comparatively minor thing as Internet interruptions.

As someone who cares deeply about following news from east africa, there is nothing minor about internet interruptions.

timewizard• 1 year ago

This is Africa. So the first question you should ask yourself is "do they even have electricity 24 hours of the day?" The answer is generally "they're lucky to get 8 hours in a day."

I mean, it's a disappointing that Facebook isn't available in Uganda, but I think there are some bigger ticket items on the continent to be concerned with first.

rbanffy9• 1 year ago

At least in Brazil, blocks are limited to specific IP ranges and happen because companies defy court orders to hand over publisher data the court considers illegal - irregular electoral propaganda, misinformation campaigns, etc. Rumble, AFAIK, is blocked in Brazil right now. Twitter and WhatsApp were blocked more than once.

pabs3• 1 year ago

These folks track network censorship, you can contribute by running their stuff locally.

https://ooni.org/

jp423• 1 year ago

Internet shutdown typically happens during riots/ violent protests. Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent. Though Starlink has to follow country's laws and actually shutdown the internet. Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country and they will find ways to enable the internet for protesters with starlink or some other ways.

alephnerd3• 1 year ago

Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent

It still requires a radio transmitter. If push comes to shove, a government can still track RF leakage or worst case GPS jamming (if it's really that existential).

Iran did the same thing when cracking down on Satelite TV and SatPhones during the crackdown of the Green Revolution (anti-Ahmedinijad protests in 2009) and anecdotally, Starlink terminals have been increasingly unstable in Iran.

I also vaguely remember a DIUx RFS within the past year for startups working on minimizing RF leakage from terminals.

bilbo0s4• 1 year ago

A lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering.

It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."

daveguy• 1 year ago

Starlink puts "internet shutdown" in the hands of just one asshole oligarch.

protocolture5• 1 year ago

Not really, but he does comply with every law.

jp423• 1 year ago

why i am being downvoted for this :confused:

rbanffy9• 1 year ago

Most likely this part you didn’t realize happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43354309

protocolture5• 1 year ago

You are very loudly and assertively wrong.

protocolture5• 1 year ago

Starlink always sides with the government. ALWAYS. Starlink doesnt make anything impotent. They just retransmit to a ground station in the same country. They signed on to every anti speech law in your country. They do business. Musk does not care about you or free speech.

Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country

What kind of seppocentric drool is this statement?

LoraWAN and Wifi based local chat apps are about all that works for most protesters when the internet gets axed.

Synaesthesia• 1 year ago

Internet has become an essential right up there with housing, electricity, water etc.

Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.

bilbo0s4• 1 year ago

Um.

Yeah.

The internet is important. But if you go some places in this world you learn in a very swift fashion that it is not as important as housing, food, and water.

There's parts of the world that are not a fairy tale. Places where people have far more basic worries.

That said, if there are parts of Africa where people want the luxury of internet, they should, of course, be allowed access. The mere fact that they want it is an indication that they are in a relatively well off area.

ty68536• 1 year ago

Counterpoint: in the third world some 3rd rate shack with a shitty well or water source may often come 'free' as it stays in the family. I have seen people in the third world blow most their paycheck on phone and internet related charges since food/water/shelter may cost a villager in a farm basically nothing and the internet is entertainment and communication for a whole month.

soulofmischief• 1 year ago

Just because some people are deprived of it doesn't mean it shouldn't be a right. And the fact that some of these communities don't even have time to consider it a priority when they're also deprived of other basic rights doesn't mean that it isn't also a basic right. It's not a fairy tale to expect basic human rights. The entire world could be connected if that's what powerful people wanted.

Internet should not be a luxury in any community. That is against the ethos of the web, which should be free, open and accessible. Your comment is needlessly patronizing and dismissive without actually presenting any evidence that the internet shouldn't be considered essential for any modern community.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

Increasingly, you need the internet working to access your money or pay for things. I've found you unfortunately need to pay for food.

hbn• 1 year ago

It's essential if you live in a place where it's essential.

But there are plenty of places where everything hasn't gone all digital, which makes living without internet much easier than it is in e.g. America.

Terr_• 1 year ago

It's interesting to think that if the US Constitution had been created in today's technological environment, the founders would have authorized a federal United States Internet Service, as opposed to a postal one.

rbanffy9• 1 year ago

Maybe it’s time to create one.

On second thought, I’d wait 4 years before starting that.

bmitc2• 1 year ago

I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...

CSMastermind• 1 year ago

I don't want to be dependant on Starlink (or any one provider) for internet.

I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.

bmitc2• 1 year ago

I was being sarcastic in case it wasn't clear. I agree with you.

benced• 1 year ago

This is especially notable when you consider African states are bad at basically everything you'd expect a state to be able to do but are apparently very capable of this.

mywittyname3• 1 year ago

Blocking internet access is pretty simple thing to do, especially compared to something like building and maintaining a bridge.

gunian• 1 year ago

between tribalism genocidal maniacs that torture ppl and five eyes divide and conquer you kind of have to lol

Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

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