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Retrospective · Tigray, Ethiopia, November 2020 · published

Tigray: two years without a connection

Эта статья на английском языке.

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When war broke out in Ethiopia's Tigray region in November 2020, its phone and internet connections were cut. For about two years, more than five million people were almost completely unreachable, one of the longest regional blackouts anywhere.

What happened

  • Nov 2020 As fighting began between the federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front, telephone, internet and much of the banking system in Tigray went dark.
  • 2021–2022 The blackout continued through the war. News from the region came out slowly, through satellite phones and people who managed to leave.
  • Nov 2022 A peace agreement was signed. Electricity returned first; phone and internet service came back gradually as the damaged network was rebuilt, for the first time since November 2020, according to Freedom House.

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Why it mattered

A blackout during a war makes it almost impossible to document what happens, to coordinate aid or for families to find out whether their relatives are alive. Top10VPN estimated the shutdowns cost Ethiopia about 146 million US dollars in 2022 alone. Tigray also showed that a blackout does not need one dramatic switch: damaged infrastructure and cut-off supplies can keep a region dark for years.

What Blackout Map would show

Like Kashmir, Tigray is a regional case: Ethiopia's capital and most of the country stayed online. Our regional judgement would mark the region as down where we have hosts there, and list it under "Regional outages". Ethiopia has also had several nationwide shutdowns, which our map would show as a country outage. See Ethiopia's outage history.

Sources

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Blackout Map is a live map of internet outages and shutdowns around the world. Open the map · Security watch · RSS · Follow us on X: @Blackoutmap_net

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Retrospective · Jammu and Kashmir, India, August 2019Kashmir: 550 days without full internetThe shutdown that began in August 2019 became the longest ever imposed in a democracy. High-speed mobile internet only returned in February 2021. Retrospective · Myanmar, February 2021Myanmar 2021: a coup, and an internet curfewAfter the February 2021 coup, Myanmar's military cut the internet nationwide, then every night, then all mobile data: a shutdown shaped by the hour. Retrospective · Tonga, January 2022Tonga: the volcano that cut a country offThe 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption shredded the only cable linking Tonga to the world. The country was almost completely offline for five weeks.

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