Tracking Internet Shutdown, 2019—2025 | ISOC Pulse

Tracking Internet Shutdown, 2019—2025

6 August 2026

Robbie Mitchell

Internet Society

Categories:

Shutdown

In short:

Between 2019 and 2025, Pulse recorded 916 Internet Shutdown events across 61 countries, spanning five continents.

Most shutdowns were brief: 70.8% lasted one day or less, and 95.4% ended within 30 days.

Asia and Africa account for the most number of shutdown events, with India account for nearly one in every two events recorded.

Since 2019, Internet Society Pulse has been tracking Internet Shutdown events to acknowledge and empower local activists and to provide data for targeted research and technical monitoring.<br>Over the past 12 months, we have been working with the VEsinFiltro team at Conexion Segura y Libre to audit these events, enhance our methodology, and analyze the trends. This body of work has resulted in our refreshed Internet Shutdown Tracker page, a detailed report on Internet Shutdown Trends from 2019—2025, and the inclusion of shutdown data in the Pulse API.<br>Below is a summary of the key takeaways from this work.

Read the full report: Internet Shutdown Trends 2019—2025

Brief by Design, Permanent by Choice

Between 2019 and 2025, Pulse recorded 916 Internet Shutdown events across 61 countries, spanning five continents. This is a combination of short-term national or regional shutdowns, prolonged regional shutdowns, and long-term service or content blocking.<br>Most shutdowns were brief: 70.8% lasted one day or less, and 95.4% ended within 30 days.

Regional shutdowns account for the largest share of recorded incidents at 55.8%, and most are short-lived, with nearly 90% lasting less than a week. India enacted 404 of these shutdowns, the largest exponent of Internet shutdowns globally.<br>National shutdowns are even more concentrated at the short end, with 83.1% lasting one day or less.

Service and content blocking are especially likely to become permanent or semi-permanent censorship. Active blocking incidents have a median duration of more than 900 days. The four longest service-blocking cases—China, Russia, Myanmar, and Iran—involve national-level restrictions on social media, communications platforms, search engines, news outlets, or app stores. These cases are politically motivated, government-driven, and designed not merely to temporarily interrupt connectivity but to isolate users from information flows for many years.

Motivations for Shutting Down the Internet

While Internet shutdowns are a disproportionate response that harms the integrity of the Internet and the societies that endure them, it is often possible to identify their motivations.<br>The most general “trigger” for an Internet shutdown is “government action“: an intentional government order that can't be confidently attributed to more specific government motivations. Government action accounts for the majority of incidents, with 389 cases. However, its prevalence has declined sharply from 119 cases in 2019 to 22 in 2025. This may reflect changes in state incentives, shifts in how governments justify restrictions, or difficulties classifying older incidents retrospectively.

At the same time, exam-related shutdowns have increased dramatically, from 17 cases in 2019 to 85 in 2024 and 59 in 2025. Algeria, India, Iraq, and Syria have ordered the most national and regional Internet shutdowns during public exams to prevent cheating—a disproportionate excuse given that cheating can also occur through conventional phone calls, earpieces, microphones, Bluetooth, or local Wi-Fi.

These shutdowns disrupt far more than exam communications: they affect essential services, economic activity, government services, educational access, and public trust in the Internet. Further, if people come to see the Internet as available only intermittently, this can weaken confidence in digital infrastructure and limit its social and economic benefits.

Shutdown Practices Differ Strongly by Region and Country

South Asia accounts for 48.8% of all recorded incidents, largely because of India’s repeated regional shutdowns. East Asia and the Pacific have fewer total incidents but include several very long-running cases.<br>Sub-Saharan Africa shows a declining trend, but with diverse motivations.<br>The Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan show a particularly strong concentration of exam-related shutdowns, which made up 81.1% of shutdowns in that grouping.<br>Latin America and the Caribbean had relatively few shutdowns, concentrated mainly in Venezuela and Cuba. North America is the only region without recorded shutdowns in the dataset.<br>The temporal overlap of multi-month shutdowns within specific regions suggests shared patterns of regional security pressure, political instability, and crisis response. It may also point to a possible peer-influence effect, in which authorities observe or adopt restrictive practices used by neighboring states.<br>This led the VEsinFiltro team to look...