What is an Internet Shutdown?

An internet shutdown may be defined as 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.(1) In other words, this arises when someone, be it the government or a private sector actor, intentionally disrupts the internet, a telecommunications network or an internet service, arguably to control or curb what people say or do.(2)

In some instances, this may entail there being a total network outage, whereby access to the internet is shutdown in its entirety.  This is sometimes also referred to as a ‘kill switch’. In other circumstances, this may also arise when access to mobile communications, websites or social media and messaging applications is blocked, throttled or rendered effectively unusable.(3) Shutdowns may affect an entire country, towns or regions within a country, or even multiple countries, and have been seen to range from several hours to several months.(4)

It should be noted that in order to conduct shutdowns governments typically require cooperation from private actors that operate networks or facilitate network traffic.(5) As noted by the United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on freedom of expression, large-scale attacks on network infrastructure committed by private parties, such as distributed denial-of-service (known as ‘DDoS’) attacks, may also have shutdown effects.