If the splinternet is the methodical construction of digital borders, the internet shutdown is its blunt, immediate instrument, and Africa has been living with it longer than most. The continent has functioned, in effect, as a laboratory of shutdowns: a place where the disconnection of whole populations has become routine enough to reveal both the mechanics of the practice and the human cost it imposes. What distinguishes the African experience is that these shutdowns are often local and targeted rather than the wholesale national isolation seen in Iran or Russia, yet their cumulative effect is no less severe.
A decade of documenting shutdowns
The chapter’s framing came from the keynote by Felicia Anthonio, who leads the #KeepItOn campaign at Access Now. The first deliberate shutdown she traced to 2006, when Guinea’s president, facing strikes and protests, ordered the world’s first, citing national security. Iran reused the tactic against the Green Movement in 2009; Egypt took it further in 2011 with a near-total blackout of internet, voice, and SMS. By 2016, Access Now and partners launched #KeepItOn to coordinate the pushback. The coalition has since grown into a global network of more than 366 organizations across 105 countries.
2,102shutdowns documented worldwide, 2016–2025, across 100+ countries | 313shutdowns in 2025 across 52 countries — a record high, up from 304 in 2024 | 125shutdowns in 2025 tied directly to conflict, across 14 countries |
Anthonio’s central observation was that what began as an experimental authoritarian tactic is now a primary tool used by democratic and authoritarian governments alike. In 2025, she reported, not a single day passed without the internet being shut down the internet somewhere in the world. The justifications have barely changed in two decades but the real triggers, she argued, are consistent: protests, contested elections, and the desire to control a narrative or conceal abuses. Shutdowns, in her phrase, do not happen without a reason; there is always something on the ground a government is trying to hide.
The durations are punishing. Anthonio cited Iran’s population being deliberately cut off for more than sixty days at the time of speaking; Ethiopia’s Tigray region disconnected for over two years amid conflict; and an ongoing shutdown on the small island of Annobón, in Equatorial Guinea, running since 2024. Increasingly, she warned, governments target the alternative connectivity that people fall back on – confiscating satellite terminals, threatening users with arrest, or, as in Uganda before its elections, prevailing on Starlink to restrict service even where the company holds no operating licence. As VPNs and then satellite links are picked off, the case for more resilient tooling grows.
Hybrid warfare and the cross-border shutdown
A recurring theme was that shutdowns increasingly function as instruments of hybrid warfare, reaching across national borders. Anthonio’s data recorded eighteen instances of cross-border shutdowns in seven countries in a single year: Israel responsible for disruptions in Palestine, Russia targeting ICT infrastructure in Ukraine, Thailand affecting Cambodia and Myanmar, China affecting Myanmar, and a Cameroonian disruption spilling into the Central African Republic. Measuring responsibility, she explained, sometimes rests on direct evidence such as airstrikes on telecommunications infrastructure, and sometimes on indirect leverage. In Palestine, for instance, Israel’s control over fuel supplies eventually degrades the ICT infrastructure that depends on it. This work depends on joint remote and in-country measurement, corroborating a drop in traffic against events on the ground.
The Ukrainian journalist Anna Romandash, moderating the infrastructural-colonialism panel later in the day, situated this in lived reality. Since the start of Russia’s aggression, she noted, there have been repeated attempts to reroute internet traffic in occupied Ukrainian territories through Russian networks, to replace Ukrainian providers, to impose censorship, and to isolate people from the global internet. Control over infrastructure (e.g. telecom networks, routing, energy grids, platforms) becomes a weapon, and fragmentation can be imposed deliberately as a strategy of domination. Sovereignty in the twenty-first century, she argued, is inseparable from digital infrastructure: a democracy cannot be protected if its information space is open to external control.
Who pays: differentiated harm
Shutdowns do not fall evenly. Anthonio stressed that their impact depends on what a person relies on the internet for, and that vulnerable groups are hit hardest. When Afghanistan was disconnected, women (already barred from education) lost the online channels through which they accessed learning and reproductive-health information. In conflict, the loss of connectivity means losing the ability to learn which routes are safe, to reach humanitarian aid, or to document abuses; it becomes, quite literally, a matter of life and death. To preserve these accounts, Access Now maintains a Shutdown Impact Stories project and the STOP (Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project) database, open since 2016.
Joana Mhone, a patch-and-vulnerability specialist from Malawi attending her first SplinterCon, sharpened the point into a warning about the tools people reach for in panic. Drawing on Access Now’s own dashboard, she traced a decade of African shutdowns rising again after a brief dip, reaching some thirty in 2025. When networks are throttled or services blocked, she explained, people scramble for circumvention tools shared through unverified links, USB sticks, and WhatsApp groups, most often, free VPNs. The hidden cost is steep: by her figures, roughly 88 percent of free VPNs leak user data and around 71 percent share personal data with third parties, with some routing other users’ traffic through an unwitting person’s device, exposing them to liability for a stranger’s activity. The tool meant to protect becomes a mechanism of exposure, and harm accumulates silently.
Three factors, Mhone argued, make this especially acute in Africa: a knowledge gap, in which cybersecurity is wrongly seen as the concern of professionals rather than ordinary users; peer-based spread, in which a malicious app travels by word of mouth during a crisis; and financial constraint. A paid VPN costing twenty dollars is trivial in the West, but in her country twenty dollars is a month’s commuting budget. Her prescription was to treat safety as infrastructure: free, vetted circumvention tools provided as essential community infrastructure, like clean water, with knowledge built before a crisis rather than during it, through frameworks localized to people’s literacy and means.
Accountability in the dark
The final movement of the chapter concerned accountability – how, when the lights go out, abuses can still be documented and someone held to answer. Nils Berglund of the European University Institute argued that accountability is, before it is a political problem, an epistemic one: governments are skilled at making digital-governance commitments and poor at being held to them, and there is far more data on connectivity and infrastructure than on human rights.
What can be measured shapes what can be evaluated, producing an accountability deficit in precisely the places where independent data is hardest to collect. He described an “accountability stack” in which any broken link (a data gap, an institutional gap, an enforcement gap) severs the chain from a shutdown event to a legal remedy.
Yet the chain can be closed. Berglund cited Kenya in 2024, where a coalition of civil-society organizations used network-measurement data from OONI, Cloudflare, and IODA to document election-period shutdowns and persuaded the high court to issue interim orders, a direct line from measurement tool to legal remedy. He pointed to regional initiatives such as Paradigm Initiative’s Londa index and Research ICT Africa’s After Access surveys, and urged the community to feed local and regional evidence into the forthcoming UN review of ICT measurement methodologies, due in 2027, where the indicators and baselines that will count as legitimate are being decided now.
Kehinde Adegboyega, executive director of the Human Rights Journalists Network in Nigeria, made the case concrete through the 2020 Lekki toll-gate shooting, where the military first fired on peaceful protesters and then denied being present, a denial undone by preserved live-stream footage. His organization built what he called a pipeline of truth: capture by grassroots activists, forensic verification in a lab, and secure archiving, with metadata preserved so that material can be verified and geolocated and distinguished from AI-generated fabrication even when uploaded long after the network returns. Resilience, he argued, requires the right toolkit – offline documentation, mesh networking, and the understanding that encryption is a survival mechanism, not a luxury.
Daouda Diagne, director of the Computek Institute in Dakar, closed the panel with the Senegalese case and a transition toward the question of sovereignty. Senegal is highly connected: extensive fiber, five ISPs, high mobile penetration, with more than 96 percent of users reaching the internet by phone. Yet a single government notice can splinter it, as it did in 2021 and twice in 2023, each time for political reasons. A survey he cited found that more than half the population relies on digital tools for daily life, that business losses ran to roughly seven million CFA per business during shutdowns, that 31 percent of users could no longer communicate with their families, and that a majority reported a resulting loss of trust in democratic institutions. His community’s answer has been to build, in advance, a network trained in measurement tools and circumvention and engaged in advocacy with authorities: preparation rather than reaction. But he left a paradox that leads directly into the next chapter: how can a country claim digital sovereignty when it depends on foreign technologies, and when the same sovereignty rhetoric gives its government the legal power to splinter the network at will?