Myanmar 2021: a coup, and an internet curfew

On the morning of the military coup in Myanmar, 1 February 2021, the internet went first. What followed was not one shutdown but months of them: nationwide blackouts, a curfew for the internet every night, and a ban on mobile data.

What happened

• 1 Feb 2021 As the military detained elected leaders, mobile data and some fixed-line internet were cut nationwide.
• 6 Feb With protests growing, a near-total shutdown followed. NetBlocks measured connectivity at about 16% of normal; it lasted around 30 hours.
• 15 Feb Nightly shutdowns began: fixed-line internet was switched off from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. every night, for more than two months.
• 15 Mar All mobile data was cut, leaving only fixed lines during the day for the few who had them.
• 1 Apr Providers were ordered to shut down wireless broadband too.

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Why it mattered

Most people in Myanmar go online through their phones, so the mobile data ban cut off the majority of the country while banks and companies on fixed lines kept working. The nightly curfew hid night-time arrests and raids. It showed how shutdowns can be shaped, by hour and by type of connection, to hurt protest while keeping the economy limping along.

What Blackout Map would show

The full blackouts would turn Myanmar black. A nightly curfew shows as a repeating pattern in our charts: drops every night at the same time, visible on the 72-hour chart and in the country history. A mobile-only ban is the hardest case for probes, because most servers are on fixed lines; that is what our "possible mobile-internet shutdown" check, based on Cloudflare Radar's share of mobile traffic, is for.

Sources

• PBS: Myanmar junta blocks internet access
• Times of Israel (AP): junta shuts down internet access
• BreakingNews.ie: information blackout worsens