Protests in Iraq Lead to a Two-Day Internet Shutdown by the Government

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Protests in Iraq Lead to a Two-Day Internet Shutdown by the Government

By CircleID Reporter
July 18, 2018, 9:31 pm PDT Views: 12,922 Add Comment

Widespread protests in Iraq against the government have lead to a state of emergency where the government has ordered disconnection of the fiber backbone of Iraq that carries traffic for most of the country. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Oracle Dyn who has been monitoring the event, in a blog post today writes: “Government-directed Internet outages have become a part of regular life in Iraq. Just yesterday, the government ordered its latest national outage to coincide this year’s last 6th grade placement exam. The first government-directed outage in Iraq that we documented occurred in the fall of 2013 and revolved around a pricing dispute between the Iraqi Ministry of Communications (MoC) and various telecommunications companies operating there. While the intention of this outage was to enforce the MoC’s authority, it served mainly to reveal the extent to which Iraqi providers were now relying on Kurdish transit providers operating outside the control of the central government”

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By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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