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It turns out that ending internet service - web, email, social media, mobile phone data, apps - for an entire country is easier than you'd think. It happens frequently. And not just in corrupt dictatorships like Russia.
Hackers in the US once managed to take America's entire Eastern Seaboard offline for several hours.
United States: The 2016 Mirai attack was the largest internet outage in history.
On the morning of Friday, October 21, 2016, America woke up to find that the internet wasn't available for much of the Eastern Seaboard. Dyn, a company that provides Domain Name System (DNS) services — the web's directory of addresses, basically — to much of the internet had been taken down by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack from the Mirai botnet.
Mirai was originally created by three men, Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman, who ran a company that sold defence mechanisms to DDoS attacks. In order to drum up business, they created Mirai to launch a DDoS attack on a French web hosting firm, OVH. They were hoping that companies who hosted servers for the millions of people who play the online game Minecraft would pay them to make sure their servers never fell victim to a DDoS.
Their experiment was too successful. Afraid of the monster they created, the trio published the Mirai code online in hopes of disguising their role in creating it. The code was then used by other hackers to target Dyn.
It was the first serious indicator that a hostile third party has the ability to send the world's foremost military power back to the pre-1990s era of telecommunications.
Ethiopia: 97% without internet service following a failed coup.
Last year, the Ethiopian government proclaimed free speech was a right. But following a failed coup attempt against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Amhara Regional State Government in mid June 2019, which led to several deaths, the internet has been off.
The Republic of Ingushetia, Russia: two-week web shutdown stymies protests in border dispute with Chechnya.
In October 2018, in the runup to a series of demonstrations against a new deal on Ingushetia's border with Chechnya, the Russian government took the internet offline for two weeks, until the protests died down. Three major Russian mobile services providers went dark. The main effect was to halt activists from using Whatsapp to organise their protests, according to the Financial Times.
Mauritania: "in the midst of a near-total internet blackout".
The country had been awaiting the results of a national election. But ruling party candidate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani declared victory before the votes were counted, and police began arresting opposition party members, according to the Saudi Gazette.
Sudan: a "blockade on information in and out of Sudan."
Human rights activists believe President Idriss Deby switched off the web to quell violence between rival tribes in the north of the country, and left it off because it consolidates his power.
Venezuela: President Nicolás Maduro blacks out the internet when his main opponent speaks.
Econet Wireless, the largest internet provider in the country, said: "We were served with another directive for total shutdown of the internet until further notice."
Liberia: British hacker disables internet in attempt to help rival company.
In 2016, Daniel Kaye created a botnet named "Mirai #14" which overwhelmed Liberia's leading internet provider, Lonestar, with malicious, automated traffic. However, the "distributed denial of service attack" was so severe that it ended up jamming the rest of the country's internet service too, for a period of about 24 hours.
He had been paid by Cellcom, a rival company to Lonestar.
Kazakhstan: Daily blackouts whenever one man speaks
"Since March of 2018, authorities in Kazakhstan have throttled the internet almost daily for about an hour, whenever Mukhtar Ablyazov, the leader of the opposition group Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, is streaming on Facebook Live," according to Access Now. "Once Mr. Ablyazov goes online, users report being unable to view or upload pictures/videos on Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, and other social media platforms."
Turkey: 12 million taken offline.
Turkey routinely restricts internet access to crack down on the Kurdistan Workers' Party, according to Freedom House, a pro-democracy group.
"On September 11, 2016, landline, mobile phone, and internet services were shut down in 10 cities for six hours, affecting some 12 million residents; the shutdown came as 28 Kurdish mayors were being removed from their posts.6 A month later, the government suspended mobile and fixed-line internet service in 11 cities for several days, leaving 6 million citizens offline. Key public services, such as banks and payment mechanisms, were reportedly unavailable," Freedom House says.
