Rising repression meets global resistance: Internet shutdowns in 2025

Rising repression meets global resistance — Internet shutdowns in 2025 is the tenth annual #KeepItOn report, released on 31 March 2026 by Access Now on behalf of the #KeepItOn coalition, co-authored by the coalition's two principal global coordinators — #KeepItOn Global Campaign Manager Felicia Anthonio and #KeepItOn Global Data and Research Lead Zach Rosson — and drawn from the coalition's Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) dataset. The report documents at least 313 shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025 — the highest annual figure recorded since the coalition began tracking in 2016, surpassing the prior record of 304 shutdowns across 55 countries in 2024 — and accompanies the cumulative finding that people in 100 countries have now experienced a shutdown since coalition tracking began.

The report's substantive findings cluster along four cross-cutting axes. Conflict was the leading trigger in 2025, accounting for 125 shutdowns across 14 countries — 40% of the global total — with at least 70 of those shutdowns coinciding with grave human-rights abuses including murder, torture, rape, and apparent war crimes and atrocities in 21 countries. Asia-Pacific accounted for 195 shutdowns across 11 countries — over half the global total — led by Myanmar's 95 documented shutdowns (76 imposed by the military and 19 by external perpetrators, including a wave that undermined rescue efforts following the March 2025 earthquake), India's 65 shutdowns across 12 states and territories (the country's lowest figure since 2017 but still second globally, and accompanied by approximately 800 Kashmir arrests under Section 163 of the Criminal Procedure Code for unauthorised VPN use), Pakistan's at least 20 crackdowns, and Afghanistan's four Taliban-ordered shutdowns affecting more than 43 million people under "curbing immorality" pretexts. Platform blocking reached record highs — Facebook 31, WhatsApp 27, Telegram 23, Instagram 20, TikTok 16, and Grindr 13 times in 13 countries — and the report flags a new alternative-connectivity trend: perpetrators shut down LEO satellite internet systems 14 times across seven countries in 2025, up from four in 2024, a sharp escalation in what the coalition has previously treated as the field's likeliest shutdown-circumvention route. Seven countries newly appear on the tracker for the first time: Albania, Angola, Cambodia, Lithuania, Panama, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

The "global resistance" half of the title is the report's framing of 2025 as the year the coalition's litigation and norm-setting track produced its most concrete dividends to date. The International Criminal Court in December 2025 formally recognised the link between internet shutdowns and crimes against humanity — a development the report treats as the highest-level institutional endorsement of the coalition's longstanding framing — and the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled that 2025 shutdowns in Senegal were illegal, extending the regional-court precedent base the coalition had previously built against Togo (2020) and Nigeria (2022). Bangladesh's authorities moved to outlaw internet shutdowns entirely — the report quoting the statutory text "no telecommunication connection, related service, or internet access shall be shut down, disrupted, or restricted under any circumstance" — and South Sudan rescinded a social-media ban following civil-society pressure. Civil-society groups in Tanzania, Kenya, and Kazakhstan brought domestic-court challenges to 2025 shutdowns, with Tanzania's 29 October 2025 election-day nationwide outage becoming the cornerstone African case study of the year. The report's two co-authors framed the duality directly: Anthonio noted that "year after year, authorities seek the power to influence elections, silence and isolate people, and attack our rights", while Rosson summarised the headline finding as "from Myanmar to Tanzania, authorities shut down the internet 313 times across 52 countries in 2025".

Within the corpus, Internet shutdowns in 2025 is the first annual-publication-series anchor — the first entry whose function is to mark a single year inside a long-running, year-over-year evidence-base cycle rather than to anchor a one-off campaign, manifesto, or foundational essay. It sits inside a series that has run since 2016 and that, by the coalition's own count, has tracked more than 1,700 shutdowns globally over its first decade — placing it among the longest-running civil-society watchdog datasets the corpus tracks. It is also the first Publication anchored on the #KeepItOn coalition's working practice, complementing the existing campaign entry (Access Now #KeepItOn coalition against internet shutdowns (2016–ongoing)) and the existing message entry on the framing itself, and the first Publication co-attributed to a Ghanaian author, adding an Anglophone West African primary-authorship line to a Publications slate previously concentrated in the United States and Western Europe. Where the corpus's prior multi-country mapping report — Automating Society Report 2020 — anchors a continental European inventory of automated decision-making systems, Internet shutdowns in 2025 anchors the equivalent globally-distributed inventory of state-ordered internet shutdowns: the empirical floor on which the #KeepItOn coalition's regional-court litigation, telecommunications-provider engagement, and UN-system advocacy is built, and the reference dataset against which UN special rapporteurs, the International Criminal Court, parliamentary inquiries, and regional human-rights courts orient their own work on the file.