How Often Do Countries Shut Down the Internet?

Every few years a government orders a country’s internet off. Routing tables empty, names stop resolving, and a population that woke up connected goes dark. It is the bluntest instrument in the censorship toolkit, and the only one that works without any technical skill at all.

Short answer#

Often, and more than most people outside the affected regions realise. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented at least 313 shutdowns in 52 countries during 2025, the highest annual total since they began tracking in 2016. People in 100 countries have now experienced one.

What a shutdown actually removes#

Internet censorship works in five layers of filtering, each of which can be lifted selectively. A shutdown is the opposite: it removes connectivity itself, usually by instructing networks to drop traffic, and it is indiscriminate by design.

The variants matter because they are not all total. A full national shutdown cuts everything. A partial one targets specific applications or specific regions. Blocking an individual communications platform is the narrowest version, and it is now the most common form by count.

None of these require deep packet inspection. That is the point. The most sophisticated filtering, deep packet inspection, is a precision tool, while a shutdown needs nothing more than a routing change.

Why they are used#

The purposes recorded in the data are not censorship of content in the usual sense. They are control of events.

Shutdowns cluster around elections, protests, armed conflict and communal violence, and they are frequently timed to specific hours rather than applied indefinitely. The goal is to prevent coordination during a moment of mass mobilisation, or to limit the reach of reporting about violence.

A secondary use is to hide what is happening on the ground. Where a shutdown coincides with an incident the state would rather not see reported, the outage is doing information work.

What the record shows#

Access Now’s Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project is the most complete running record of deliberate shutdowns since 2016, and its annual report is the source for everything below.

The trend line is upward. The coalition recorded 289 shutdowns in 2023, 304 in 2024, and at least 313 in 2025. Seven countries appeared on the list for the first time in 2025.

Concentration is extreme. India recorded 65 shutdowns in 2025, its lowest count since 2017, and still leads every democracy by a wide margin. Since 2016 it accounts for 920 of 2,102 documented shutdowns worldwide. Myanmar led the 2025 total with 95.

What changed in 2025#

Three changes are worth a reader’s attention, and none of them is about volume.

Persistence. Some 75 shutdowns across 33 countries began in 2025 and continued into 2026. Temporary disruption during an event is one thing; a multi-month cutoff of a platform or region is a different instrument aimed at a different outcome.

Satellites came next. Authorities turned to Low Earth Orbit satellite internet systems, cutting them 14 times across seven countries, after four incidents the previous year. That is a sharp rise, and it extends shutdown policy to connectivity that does not pass through domestic fixed-line infrastructure at all.

Platform targeting grew too. Blocking of individual communications platforms reached a record 94 cases across 40 countries, up from 77 across 37 in 2024 and 58 across 27 in 2023.

Read together, these describe a shift from blunt national blackouts toward selective, targeted, and more durable interference.

What this means for a user#

A shutdown does not behave like censorship that a tunnel can route around. If the routing information is being withdrawn by every domestic network, a VPN cannot reconstruct a path that no network will carry.

What remains useful is narrower: an exit outside the affected country, if one is still reachable at all; an already-configured client, since a later attempt to install one may be impossible; and a plan agreed in advance, because the decision about what to do usually has to be made before the lights go out.

Limitations of the data#

The tracker is a curated dataset assembled from partner reporting, not a complete census, and it should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling. Undercounting is systematic rather than random: reporting a shutdown requires someone to observe it and someone to publish it, and both are harder where the consequences of being visible are severe.

Totals also move. The 2025 report revised the 2024 figure from 296 to 304 and the 2023 figure to 289, and states plainly that its numbers reflect the latest available data and include updates to previously published totals. An older figure that disagrees with a newer one is usually not an error; it is a superseded count.

Related#

• What Is Internet Censorship?: the filtering layers a shutdown replaces
• What Is Deep Packet Inspection?: the tooling on the other end of the spectrum
• What Does Your ISP See?: what remains visible when a shutdown is partial

Last reviewed October 8, 2026. Corrections and additions are welcome.