Digital Hopes, Real Power: The Rise of Network Shutdowns

This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.

In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.

A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns

Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.

On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected. 

In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.

In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the