Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/burkina-faso-internet-shutdown/

A few days after Sudan restored access to the Internet, people living in Burkina Faso are facing an Internet shutdown. On Saturday, Cloudflare Radar shows that after 22:00 UTC (the same local time) Internet traffic went down significantly, something that has happened in the context of social tensions in the country that started on November 14, 2021, and after this Saturday’s shooting of protesters that tried to block a French military convoy.

It is clear when we look at the last 30 days, that Sunday and today, Monday, November 22, are days almost without Internet traffic in Burkina Faso.

All the Internet Service Providers (ISP) of the country were significantly affected by what we could see in our data. That is evident when we look at HTTP traffic by ASN (Autonomous System Number). Orange, FasoNet and Telecel are the three most used ISPs in the country and this chart clearly shows how they were impacted.

Mobile traffic affected

Burkina Faso is a mobile-first country because mobile is the main way of accessing the Internet — in the last 30 days the mobile traffic percentage represented 77% of the total Internet traffic in the country.

We can also see in Cloudflare Radar that desktop traffic percentage went up after Saturday night (the dark blue line in the chart), something that indicates that mobile networks were the main focus of the shutdown.

Looking at the number of requests we get a better ‘picture’ of the situation and how the desktop traffic percentage started to take over compared to mobile traffic in the last few days.

In the case of Sudan, the Internet shutdown went on for 25 days. You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how the Burkina Faso situation evolves, but also you can see the Internet traffic globally and in every country.