Internet outage

 ( Internet Architecture ) 

An Internet outage, Internet blackout, or Internet shutdown is the complete or partial failure of the Internet access. It can occur due to censorship, , disasters,

police or security services actions, or errors.

Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas. Countries with a less developed Internet infrastructure are more vulnerable due to small numbers of high-capacity links.

A line of research finds that the Internet with it having a "hub-like" core structure that makes it robust to random losses of nodes but also fragile to targeted attacks on key components − the highly connected nodes or "hubs".

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Types

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Government blackout A government internet blackout is the deliberate shut down of civilian internet access by a government for a small area or many large areas of its country. Such a shut down is typically used as a means of information control in a brief period of upheaval or transition. In autocracies, internet shutdowns have appeared especially in the context of contested elections and post-electoral violence. Governments have also imposed internet shutdowns in the context of armed conflict, natural disasters, and school examinations. Shutdowns can impede the ability of protesters or insurgent forces to mobilize and organize. It also serves to prevent real-time information access for foreign people or entities. Reactions from leaders, journalists, observers and others in foreign countries can be delayed.

Most internet shutdowns, implemented by governments, occur in India. According to a 2022 study,

(1) rather than a centrally coordinated, top-down campaign from the central government, India’s 28 state governments are largely responsible for the issuing of shutdowns, and (2) the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is both directly and indirectly responsible for many of India’s shutdowns. BJP-run state governments issue more shutdowns than non-BJP states, primarily to suppress protest (the direct responsibility), while the party’s polarizing rhetoric and policies, coupled with the BJP-built limited regulatory framework governing the issuance of shutdowns, contribute to an environment in which the shutdowns can thrive (the indirect responsibility). Confirming these arguments, my quantitative analyses (2012–2020) reveal that districts in BJP-ruled states experience significantly more internet shutdowns (primarily in response to protests), while Hindu-Muslim conflict triggers internet shutdowns all across the country.

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Military blackout The temporary disconnection of civilian internet access by military forces is an important aspect of information warfare. This tactic is common today, and is often used in concert with a ground invasion by conventional forces. It could also be used in advance of an airstrike campaign.

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Weather or natural disaster Extreme weather events and natural disasters can lead to internet outages by either directly destroying local ICT infrastructure or indirectly damaging the local electricity grid. The Monash IP Observatory and KASPR Datahaus have tracked the impact of Hurricane Florence 2018, Cyclone Fani 2018, and Hurricane Laura in 2020.

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Solar storms Solar superstorms could cause large-scale global months-long Internet outages. Researchers have described potential mitigation measures and exceptions – such as user-powered mesh networks, related peer-to-peer applications and new protocols – and the robustness of the current Internet infrastructure.

(2021). 9781450383837, Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 9781450383837

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Cyberattacks

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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks These attacks flood a website or network with traffic from multiple sources, overwhelming the server and making it unavailable to users.

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Routing attacks These attacks target the infrastructure of the internet, specifically the routing systems that direct traffic between different networks. By manipulating or disrupting these systems, attackers can cause widespread outages.

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Malware Malicious software can infect and damage computer systems and networks, leading to internet outages.

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Botnets A botnet is a network of compromised computers that are controlled by an attacker. These computers can be used to launch DDoS attacks, spread malware, or perform other malicious actions that can cause internet outages.

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Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Hijacking Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used to route traffic on the internet. BGP hijacking is a form of cyber-attack where an attacker alters the routing information in BGP, causing internet traffic to be directed to the wrong place.

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Accidents

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Natural disasters Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can damage internet infrastructure, causing outages.

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Power failures Internet service providers (ISPs) rely on electricity to power their networks, so power failures can cause outages.

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Human error Accidents caused by human error, such as a construction crew cutting through a fiber-optic cable, can cause internet outages.

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Equipment failure The failure of equipment such as servers, routers, and switches can cause internet outages.

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Maintenance Scheduled maintenance or unexpected repairs on the internet infrastructure can cause outages.

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Weather condition Inclement weather such as heavy snow, thunderstorm, and heavy rain can cause outages by damaging the infrastructure or making it difficult for maintenance crews to access and repair the network.

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Measurement A variety of organizations measure internet shutdowns including the Open Observatory of Network Interference, Access Now, Freedom House, the Digital Society Project (using the V-Dem Institute methodology and infrastructure), the OpenNet Initiative, the University of Michigan's Censored Planet Observatory, the Internet Censorship Lab, and the Monash IP Observatory.Mechkova, V., Daniel P., Brigitte S.,&Steven W. (2020). Digital Society Project Dataset v2.Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project http://digitalsocietyproject.org/ These organizations use a range of methods to detect shutdowns such as expert analysis, remote sensing, and remote sensing with oversight. Some of these organizations, such as Access Now, maintain active lists of internet shutdowns.

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Expert Analysis

Several organizations use expert analysis to identify internet shutdowns. Some, such as the Digital Society Project (DSP), send out surveys to experts around the world, and then aggregate the results into a single score. For internet shutdowns, the DSP asks "How often does the government shut down domestic access to the Internet?" where answers range from "Extremely Often" to "Never or almost Never." Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report also uses expert analysis to assess whether internet shutdowns have occurred, but instead of surveying multiple experts, Freedom House identifies and partners with a single expert to conduct an analysis. Freedom House asks the question "Does the government intentionally disrupt the internet or cellphone networks in response to political or social events, whether temporary or long term, localized or nationwide?" Generally expert analyses are more prone to false positives and fewer false negatives (i.e. identifying shutdowns that other sources cannot confirm), than remote sensing methods with manual oversight.

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Remote Sensing

Other organizations use various remote sensing techniques to identify shutdowns. Some organizations, such as the Open Observatory of Network Interference, the Internet Censorship Lab and the Monash IP-Observatory use automated remote sensing methods to detect internet shutdowns. The Open Observatory of Network Interference uses software installed on computers of volunteers around the world to detect shutdowns. However these methods are prone to false positives, false negatives, and various technical challenges.

In order to address these concerns, some organizations have implemented various methods of oversight. Organizations such as Access Now and the OpenNet Initiative use such methods. Access Now uses technological methods to detect shutdowns, but then confirms those shutdowns using news reports, reports from local activists, official government statements, and statements from ISPs. The OpenNet Initiative has volunteers install software on their computers to check websites from access points around the world, then confirms those results with manual observations. These methods are prone to more false negatives and fewer false positives (i.e. all shutdowns that these sources identify can be confirmed by other sources) than expert analyses.

A comparatively new method for detecting internet shutdowns is remote sensing with automated oversight. These methods have been praised as more ethical and efficient as they do not endanger in-country volunteers.VanderSloot, B., McDonald, A., Scott, W., Halderman, J.A., & Ensafi, R. (2018). Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship. In Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium.Hoang, P. N., Doreen, S., Polychronakis, M., (2019). Measuring I2P Censorship at a Global Scale. In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet.Raman, R. S., Stoll, A., Dalek, J., Ramesh, R. Scott, W., & Ensafi, R. (2020). Measuring the Deployment of Network Censorship Filters at Global Scale. Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2020. However these methods have yet to produce regular datasets.

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List

All .com and .net domains
2009	Death of Michael Jackson			Shortly after the death of pop singer Michael Jackson, thousands of online media posts and users rapidly attempted results of Michael Jackson on how he died. This resulted in Google blocking Michael Jackson-related searches (after assumption that a DDoS attack was at hand), Twitter and Wikipedia crashing, and AOL Instant Messenger collapsing for 40 minutes.		Search Engines & Social Media	Multiple subjects on MJ's death results online.	Events
2012	2012 Syrian internet outage				On 29 November 2012 the Syrian internet was cut off from the rest of the world. The autonomous system (AS29386) of Syrian Telecommunication Establishment (STE) was cut off completely at 10:26 UTC. Five prefixes were reported to have remained up, this is why Dyn reports an outage of 92% of the country. Responsibility for the outage has somewhat speculatively been blamed on various organizations.
2019	Zimbabwe Internet Shutdown	Zimbabwe	Zimbabwean Citizens	Majority of the country's population	On 18 January, many parts of Zimbabwe faced an internet outage due to a national shutdown in response to rioting. This was intended to prevent protesters from collaborating and planning further incidents. Initially, it was targeting specific services - VPNs, Social Media etc. -until a point where a full shutdown was implemented at which point only Cellular services would work - without internet access.	Several days			Zimbabwe Government	Partial/Full
Iranian internet shutdown
Internet shutdown in India	50,000,000	The Government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 which caused huge controversy and mass protest in various parts of India. In order to prevent protests and outrage on social media, various state governments including those of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh decided to shut down internet access.	Up to 9 days Over one year (Kashmir)	government censorship
2019 Burmese internet shutdown
2019 Papua protests
2019	Amhara Region coup attempt							government censorship
2020	Tigray war							government censorship
2021	Facebook outage	Worldwide	LAN Internet Connection	2,850,000,000	On October 4, 2021, at around 11:45 AM EST, the online social media site Facebook went down, as well as Facebook subsidiaries including Instagram and WhatsApp. Around 4:00 PM EST, people reported other sites were not working via Downdetector, including Gmail and Twitter, the latter possibly caused by Facebook users reporting the outage. The outage came less than a day after a whistleblower had been on 60 Minutes. For a short period of time, no Facebook employee could access the building to investigate the issue due to their "keycards not working.". At around 6:30 PM EST, Facebook reported that all their sites were up. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost around $7B dollars after the outage. For more info, see 2021 Facebook outage	7 hours	LAN connection	BGP Withdrawal of IP Address (Facebook), Server overwhelming (other sites)
2022 Kazakhstan internet shutdown	mobile internet
2022	2021–2022 Iranian protests			80 million	globally cutting off its people’s access to the internet, whilst maintaining domestic national internet National Information Network
2023	Gaza war				lack of fuel led to internet services going down across the Gaza Strip			fuel shortages caused by the blockade
2024	July 2024 global cyber outages	Worldwide		~8.5 million Windows devices	On July 19, 2024, various IT systems around the world experienced an outage that has led to ongoing disruptions across different industries, including media firms, banks, and airlines.			Security software faulty configuration update.	CrowdStrike
2024	2024 Bangladesh Quota Reform Movement				The movement was being mobilized utilizing social media networks, and to establish control over the situation government applied a complete internet shutdown to suppress protests throughout the country.	5 days		government censorship
2025	2025 Internet blackout in Iran				The Islamic Republic of Iran blacked out the internet during the Iran–Israel war. The banking system crashed. WhatsApp was asked to be deleted.	Now		government censorship
2025	2025 Internet slowdown in the Middle East	and the Middle East			A major undersea cable located in the Red Sea was disrupted, triggering internet slowdowns mainly in the UAE and the Middle East since September 6, 2025. It is estimated to last six weeks, due to the process of repairing cables.	Now		Cable disruption in the Red Sea	Unknown	Full
2025					Taliban reportedly imposes blackout in a crackdown on immorality.			government censorship
2025	Cloudflare	Worldwide		~2,650,000,000	On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a global outage that caused widespread 500 errors, resulting in many websites running slowly, being unavailable, or not working at all for users around the world (including sites such as Twitter, Spotify, Uber, Canva, and ChatGPT).	6 hours	Database system integrated with the Bot Management service	A permissions change in a database triggered a bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management system
2026 Internet blackout in Iran

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Prevention

Internet outages can be prevented by a more resilient, decentralized Internet architecture.

For internet outages that are caused by issues on the internet service provider's or mobile network carrier's side, businesses and consumers can use failover solutions that use channel bonding / link aggregation technology. The idea is to use multiple internet sources from different providers. If one of them fails, the traffic is picked up by the other working one(s).

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Management

Modern society, especially in developed countries, depends heavily on the Internet not just for communication. There have been some measures taken and possibilities exist for managing and countering a large-scale Internet outage.

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Temporary alternative forms of communication

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See also

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External links

• The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B, TED talk by Danny Hillis
• Redecentralize.org

Categories: Internet Architecture, Cyberwarfare

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