Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/sudan-seven-days-without-internet-access-and-counting/

It’s not every day that there is no Internet access in an entire country. In the case of Sudan, it has been five days without Internet after political turmoil that started last Monday, October 25, 2021 (as we described).

The outage continues with almost a flat line and just a trickle of Internet traffic from Sudan. Cloudflare Radar shows that the Internet in Sudan is still almost completely cut off.

There was a blip of traffic on Tuesday at ~14:00 UTC, for about one hour, but it flattened out again, and it continues like that — anyone can track the evolution on the Sudan page of Cloudflare Radar.

Internet shutdowns are not that rare

Internet disruptions, including shutdowns and social media restrictions, are common occurrences in some countries and Sudan is one where this happens more frequently than most countries according to Human Rights Watch. In our June blog, we talked about Sudan when the country decided to shut down the Internet to prevent cheating in exams, but there were situations in the past more similar to this days-long shutdown — something that usually happens when there’s political unrest.

The country’s longest recorded network disruption was back in 2018, when Sudanese authorities cut off access to social media (and messaging apps like WhatsApp) for 68 consecutive days from December 21, 2018 to February 26, 2019. There was a full mobile Internet shutdown reported from June 3 to July 9, 2019 that lasted 36 days.

You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see the Internet traffic globally and in every country.