Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) 

An internet shutdown is an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.

STOP was designed as a contextual dataset. We record shutdown instances to identify and attribute shutdowns to particular actors, document the specific human rights harms of shutdowns, support efforts to establish a coordinated action plan to enable alternative access to internet services, and to hold the perpetrators of shutdowns accountable.

A shutdown instance refers to any disruption event lasting longer than one hour, or a series of disruption events that we attribute to the same or similar circumstances, justifications, methods, and perpetrators. Depending on the circumstances, such as the status of local laws, the ability of each actor involved, and the state of humanitarian crises, a shutdown instance may result from one or several different technical events, which may change in scope during the instance in question.

Shutdowns are deliberate actions taken by authorities to silence, isolate, or restrain people during protests, examinations, conflict, elections, and other important events. They continue to grow in number and technical complexity, with many “repeat offenders” hitting the kill switch year after year. As a result, shutdowns can come in many forms, and our tracker looks at full network shutdowns, bandwidth throttling, service-based blocking for two-way communication platforms, and sometimes a combination of all three across one shutdown instance. We also determine whether mobile and/or broadband networks are affected, and the geographic extent of the shutdown. (All of our column indicators can be reviewed below in Metadata).

Apart from the one-hour minimum requirement, we only consider disruptions that we can attribute to a specific cause. Through a combination of multiple quantitative and qualitative sources, we carefully verify recorded internet disruptions and blockings, and attribute them to specific actors as deliberate internet shutdowns. Imposing parties include all levels of government, the judiciary, militaries, and police forces, some of which occasionally implement shutdowns across borders and in occupied territories. Our tracker includes shutdowns imposed by deliberate disconnection or interference at internet service providers (ISPs), as well as shutdowns caused by the targeting of civilian infrastructure through airstrikes, fuel embargoes causing infrastructure failure, cyberattacks, and more.

For billions of people worldwide, online platforms with peer-to-peer messaging and information-sharing functions are the main way of accessing and using the internet, allowing efficient and immediate communication, access to information, and (ideally) free expression. They play a vital role in enabling human rights, whether during disaster response, coordination of protest movements, elections, or accessing humanitarian corridors during conflict. As a result, based on our definition, any interference with these services intended to render them inaccessible or effectively unusable is considered a contravention of human rights and an internet shutdown.

For the purposes of an internet shutdown, peer-to-peer messaging and information sharing can be broadly defined as two-way or multi-way exchange of information through platforms. In comparison, broadcast media and news publishing as accessed through the internet are effectively one-way communication. Deliberate blockings of these sites are clear acts of censorship, and interfere with the exercise of freedom of expression and access to information, but fall outside the specific scope of an internet shutdown for advocacy purposes.

With governments increasingly turning to targeted forms of shutdowns, whether focused on specific geographies or mobile networks, platform blocks have become a tool to quash dissent and control the flow of information. Alongside broader censorship of news and other websites, governments often deliberately block platforms for months or even years at a time. Similar to other ongoing shutdowns extending over multiple calendar years, we count ongoing platform blocks once per every year in which they occur, to account for the ongoing, deliberate decision of leaders to cut off access to a platform.

Since 2019, we’ve tracked shutdowns of Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram in five separate columns of our dataset as they are some of the most frequently and widely used platforms. However, we include other service blocks, as they arise, in the other_affected column (e.g. Signal, TikTok, Grindr), and continue working to include all impacted platforms as they become more popular and thus prone to targeting by authorities. (See descriptions of all columns in our dataset in the Metadata section below).

Overall, platform blocks have historically been under-reported, and our team has engaged in an ongoing process of updating the STOP dataset to include more of these and other longstanding but previously under-counted shutdowns. Getting an accurate picture of the full scope of platform blocks underway around the world is a challenge due to the localized nature of platform preferences, limited measurement data for platforms in countries where the user base is relatively small, discrepancies when a government does not fully or consistently implement stated policies for platform blocking, and people’s regular use of VPNs and other similar tools to circumvent blocks. To correct this, Access Now is adding missing data on longstanding platform blocks, and will continue to work closely with #KeepItOn coalition partners, including the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), to strengthen our documentation in this area and hold all perpetrators to account.

In addition to documenting the type, scope, cause, and justification of each shutdown in our dataset, we also track metrics including duration, correlation with violence and serious human rights abuses, and specific groups targeted. This data allows us to analyze trends over time and identify new and ongoing impacts of shutdowns. (Descriptions of all columns are available in the Metadata section below.) In the course of our reporting on shutdowns around the world, we count shutdowns by country and region to show where shutdowns are happening and roughly how often to hold perpetrators to account and direct attention to impacted areas. These counts are broadly a collection of the total number of times authorities decided to shut off the internet for people within a given location.

In every shutdown instance, a government, military, or other ruling power ultimately makes the choice to cut off the internet. Whether it’s through a multi-day court order, a series of shutdowns rolled out during school exam periods, or intermittent shutdowns deployed during ongoing protests, a shutdown instance most often results from one consequential decision made by someone in a position of authority. Based on contextual information on how and why a shutdown was implemented, we define a shutdown instance and collect all the relevant details linked to the single action by an authority figure. This means a government that makes numerous snap decisions over the course of ongoing protests would end up being linked to numerous shutdown instances, while a predetermined, single policy of shutdowns during a school exam period would end up being linked to one shutdown instance. These factors, as well as the discrepancy in data coverage in many regions around the world, result in slight variations when determining a shutdown instance and counting shutdowns across different contexts.

The duration of shutdowns can vary widely, from months to years during protracted conflicts, to hours-long shutdowns during protests. Whether short or long, however, they can have severe impacts, covering up police brutality and human rights abuses during shorter, targeted disruptions, or shrouding atrocities and war crimes during prolonged shutdowns. Our aim is to call attention to the harms of every shutdown, no matter how short or long, so that no one endures a shutdown in silence. As described in the previous question, (What metrics do we use to track and report on shutdowns? Why do we count shutdowns differently depending on context?), shutdown instances are determined by their linkage to authorities’ actions. Other than a minimum duration of one hour, shutdown instances can be defined at any length. As a result, with our current approach, total counts of shutdown instances by country group together shutdowns of all durations.

The metrics described in the previous question – total counts by country, scale, duration, correlation with serious human rights abuses and violence, and groups targeted – can all be used to emphasize the severity of shutdowns. However, in addition to quantitative measures, the #KeepItOn Shutdown Impact Stories project continues to highlight the wide-ranging experiences of people around the world living with the impacts of internet shutdowns. Their stories have spurred unequivocal condemnation and are key evidence for documenting the human harms of internet shutdowns. Our annual #KeepItOn report also provides contextual information and local nuance, highlighting the people affected and specific harms which make clear that shutdowns are incompatible with human rights.

However, we do wish to acknowledge that, while our approach to counting shutdowns works well in many regions and contexts, in others it can serve as a detriment to our partners’ goals or misrepresent the complexity of how shutdowns are happening. Whether inadvertently or on purpose, journalists and media organizations can misrepresent, distort, or simplify STOP data to fit certain narratives or compare countries. And state actors can justify or minimize their own actions, while purposefully ignoring or omitting facts for their own political gain.

For example, in the Asia Pacific region where authorities in multiple countries are some of the most entrenched shutdown perpetrators, India has consistently led the world with the highest total number of recorded shutdowns each year, documentation of which has been possible in part thanks to court orders requiring authorities to publish shutdown orders. It is important to note that other countries in the region also have alarming practices regarding shutdowns, but documentation of these may be less clear. In Myanmar, for example, reports indicate that the military junta has likely implemented hundreds of localized shutdowns during its operations in recent years, which have gone undocumented. The number of shutdowns recorded in STOP for Myanmar since 2021 leaves many of those likely shutdowns uncaptured, as independent verification has become increasingly difficult amid crackdowns on digital rights activists, decentralized decision making, and continued degradation of infrastructure. Although #KeepItOn coalition partners have worked tirelessly to uncover evidence of these shutdowns, we continue working actively to ensure the data presented through STOP more accurately reflects the severity of shutdowns happening across Myanmar since the coup.

Systematically documenting and reporting on human rights abuses will always be an imperfect process. We are nevertheless committed to improving how we represent shutdown severity, exploring new avenues and metrics for understanding risks and harms, and representing regional differences in shutdown tracking to the best of our ability.

A number of factors contribute to historically and comparatively lower numbers of reported shutdowns in the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China. In both countries, systematized censorship, surveillance, and legally entrenched use of a domestic intranet significantly decrease authorities’ need to use shutdowns as a tool to stifle dissent or control information flows. In parallel, activists and technologists in these countries face insurmountable threats and challenges when sharing shutdown reports and data. In previous years, both countries have nonetheless imposed targeted shutdowns in various contexts, as well as ongoing platform blocks as part of persistent crackdowns on dissent.

Since its illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military has imposed a barrage of shutdowns, underscoring the serious harms that Russia’s government has inflicted beyond its borders. Russia has also blocked multiple social media platforms in recent years across the country, including Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). So far in 2024, reports indicate that Telegram and WhatsApp were throttled across multiple regions, and there are separate reports of YouTube also being throttled.

In China, many ongoing shutdowns went into effect before we started collecting STOP data in 2016, with some dating back to 2009. The current dataset captures more recent shutdowns, including blocks of Signal and Grindr ongoing in the country since 2021. Meanwhile, a 2023 incident damaging undersea cables in the Taiwan Strait, which caused an internet disruption on a Taiwanese island, raised concerns that the Chinese government was attempting to extend its control over internet access, communication channels, and information flows.

In North Korea, the global internet is generally only available to a small group of wealthy elites and academic institutions, with everyone else only able to use the state-run, “walled garden” intranet, Kwangmyong. This level of authoritarianism and isolation has historically prevented the North Korean government from needing to resort to internet shutdowns — but the country reportedly still blocked Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube in 2016. With limited ability to monitor internet traffic and censorship in North Korea, identifying new shutdowns and determining if platform blocks are ongoing remains an active area of work.