Internet outage
An Internet outage or Internet blackout can occur due to censorship, cyberattacks, disasters, police or security services actions or errors.
Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas. Countries with a less developed Internet infrastructure are more vulnerable due to small numbers of high-capacity links.
A line of research finds that the Internet with it having a "hub-like" core structure that makes it robust to random losses of nodes but also fragile to targeted attacks on key components − the highly connected nodes or "hubs".
List
| Year | Name | Country or region | Affected users | Number of affected users | Description | Duration | Internet component | Cause | Entity responsible | Type |
| 2008 | 2008 submarine cable disruption | Middle East and Mediterranean Sea | Three separate incidents of major damage to submarine optical communication cables around the world occurred in 2008. The first incident caused damage involving up to five high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East from 23 January to 4 February 2008, causing internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the Middle East and India. In late February there was another outage, this time affecting a fiber optic connection between Singapore and Jakarta. On 19 December, FLAG FEA, GO-1, SEA-ME-WE 3, and SEA-ME-WE 4 were all cut. | submarine cables | ||||||
| 2011 | 2011 submarine cable disruption | South Asia and Middle East | In two incidents of submarine communications cables cut off on 25 December 2011. The first cut off occurred to SEA-ME-WE 3 at Suez canal, Egypt and the second cut off occurred to i2i which took place between Chennai, India and Singapore line. Both the incidents had caused the Internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the South Asia and Middle East in particular UAE. | submarine cables | ||||||
| 2011 | 3,000,000 | A woman digging for scrap metal damaged land cables and thereby severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. | 5 hours | land cables | digging | |||||
| 2011 | The Internet in Egypt was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests. | ISPs | government censorship | |||||||
| 2012 | 2012 Syrian internet outage | On 29 November 2012 the Syrian Internet was cut off from the rest of the world. The autonomous system of Syrian Telecommunication Establishment was cut off completely at 10:26 UTC. Five prefixes were reported to have remained up, this is why Dyn reports an outage of 92% of the country. Responsibility for the outage has somewhat speculatively been blamed on various organizations. | Unknown | Unknown | ||||||
| 2016 | Deutsche Telekom | 900,000 | At the end of November 2016 0.9 million routers, from Deutsche Telekom and produced by Arcadyan, were crashed due to failed TR-064 exploitation attempts by a variant of Mirai, which resulted in Internet connectivity problems for the users of these devices. While TalkTalk later patched their routers, a new variant of Mirai was discovered in TalkTalk routers. | 1 day | Internet routers | cyberattack | ||||
| 2016 | Mirai has also been used in an attack on Liberia's Internet infrastructure in November 2016. | cyberattack | ||||||||
| 2016 | 2016 Dyn cyberattack | Dyn | The cyberattack took place on October 21, 2016, and involved multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks targeting systems operated by Domain Name System provider Dyn, which caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The distributed denial-of-service attack was accomplished through a large number of DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses. The activities are believed to have been executed through a botnet consisting of a large number of Internet-connected devices—such as printers, IP cameras, residential gateways and baby monitors—that had been infected with the Mirai malware. With an estimated throughput of 1.2 terabits per second, the attack is, according to experts, the largest DDoS attack on record. | 1 day | Domain Name System provider | cyberattack | ||||
| 2017 | South-West and North-West of Cameroon | 20% of the country's population | On January 17, around 20 percent of the people in Cameroon had their Internet blocked due to recent anti-government protests. | 270 days or 8 months | government censorship | |||||
| 2017 | On October 1, The autonomous system of Star JV was cut off completely, due to alleged US cyber attack | 9 hours and 31 minutes | cyberattack | |||||||
| 2019 | Verizon and BGP Optimizer | Verizon | On June 24, 2019, many parts of the Internet faced an unprecedented outage as Verizon, the popular Internet transit provider accidentally rerouted IP packages after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA. According to The Register, systems around the planet were automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going through DQE and Allegheny, which buckled under the strain, causing traffic to disappear into a black hole. | 3 hours | Internet transit provider | misconfiguration | ||||
| 2019 | Iranian internet shutdown | The Internet in Iran was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 96% of networks were without access in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests. | 7 days | ISPs | government censorship | |||||
| 2019 | Internet shutdown in India | 50,000,000 | The Government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 which caused huge controversy and mass protest in various parts of India. In order to prevent protests and outrage on social media, various state governments including those of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh decided to shut down internet access. | Up to 9 days | government censorship | Various State governments of India | ||||
| 2019 | 2019 Burmese internet shutdown | On June 21, the Internet in Burma was shut down by the government. The Burmese government shut down the internet connection in nine townships of the northern Arakan State and one single township in the Southern Chin State, which was proposed by Burmese Military officers. The shutdown is ongoing, and has become the world's longest internet shutdown. | Government censorship | |||||||
| 2019 | 2019 Papua protests | To curb the escalating protests occurred in the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, Indonesian authority imposed an internet blackout on both provinces on 21 August 2019. The blackout continues until the authority partially lift the blackout in 4 September on several regions, with complete lifting of the restriction only occurred in 9 September. | 19 days | Government censorship | ||||||
| Year | Name | Country or region | Affected users | Number of affected users | Description | Duration | Internet component | Cause | Entity responsible | Type |