On 31 March 2026, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition published their 2025 annual count. The Africa numbers were the headline: 30 deliberate internet shutdowns across 15 countries, up from 21 across 15 countries in 2024 — a 43% jump in a single year. Globally the coalition documented 313 shutdowns in 52 nations, with not a single day of 2025 passing without at least one disruption somewhere on earth. Ethiopia, again, made the country list.
The report is worth taking seriously precisely because its methodology is conservative — only confirmed, deliberate, government-attributable disruptions are counted, and outages caused by infrastructure failure are excluded. That makes the 2025 total a floor, not a ceiling. And it makes the African trajectory — from a one-off crisis tool in the late 2010s to a routine instrument used in 8 protest contexts and 4 election contexts on the continent last year — a policy story rather than a statistical artefact.
The steelman for the kill switch
The strongest case for emergency connectivity controls is not frivolous. Officials in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam genuinely face moments where viral mis- or disinformation has accelerated mob violence, where coordinated incitement campaigns have run on Facebook and TikTok, and where law-enforcement capacity is too thin to track and prosecute individual offenders in real time. A temporary, narrowly scoped throttle is, on paper, a less violent response than deploying soldiers to a town square.
Ethiopia's social-media restrictions during the February 2023 Orthodox Church schism — which NetBlocks observed being executed by state-owned Ethio Telecom against Facebook, TikTok and Telegram — were defended in exactly those terms. So were the 2023-2024 Amhara blackouts, framed as a response to clashes between federal forces and Fano militias. The argument that connectivity can, in narrow circumstances, be a force multiplier for organised violence is one regulators have to take seriously rather than wave away.
Why the case collapses under scrutiny
The problem is that the actual implementation never matches the theory. The Amhara shutdown — which Addis Standard reported was finally lifted in July 2024 — ran for roughly eleven consecutive months across nineteen cities. The earlier Tigray blackout, documented by the Internet Society's Pulse project, lasted 818 days. These are not surgical, time-limited interventions. They are blanket bans that long outlive any specific security trigger and that punish entire civilian populations for the actions of armed actors they did not choose.
The downstream harms are concrete. Access Now's earlier open statement on the Amhara shutdown documented that banking, telephone, medical and education services were disrupted, and that humanitarian assistance to internally displaced people was hindered. The Institute for Security Studies estimates that internet shutdowns cost sub-Saharan Africa over US$1.6 billion in economic losses in 2024 alone. Domestic Ethiopian advocacy group CARD Ethiopia has put the cost of the February 2023 social-media ban at more than $140 million in foregone economic activity. Those are not abstractions. They translate into smaller pay packets for the same gig workers, e-commerce sellers and remittance recipients whose livelihoods governments claim to be protecting.
And then there is the rights ledger. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 country report rated Ethiopia 30 out of 100 — "Not Free" — citing the May 2025 two-year sentence handed to journalist Ahmed Awga on "disinformation" charges, the arrest of at least ten online journalists, and continued localised disruptions in Oromia throughout the coverage period. When a government can both switch off connectivity and prosecute journalists for what they post when connectivity returns, the chilling effect compounds.
The legitimacy gap
There is also a procedural objection that should appeal even to readers who are sympathetic to robust state security responses. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights passed a resolution in March 2024 calling on states to reverse the shutdown trend and committing the continental human-rights body to monitoring it. Ethiopia is a state party to the African Charter. Ordering Ethio Telecom to throttle traffic by ministerial directive — with no independent judicial sign-off, no published legal basis, no defined sunset clause and no after-action review — sits uneasily with that commitment regardless of one's politics.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's recent essay on the rise of network shutdowns frames the same problem more bluntly: across jurisdictions, ad-hoc emergency measures have been quietly converted into permanent legal infrastructure, and proactive shutdowns are now used to preempt dissent rather than only react to active unrest. That is the trajectory African regulators are currently on, and it is the one the 30-shutdown figure for 2025 measures.
The proportionate alternative
A pro-innovation, pro-rule-of-law position here is not "governments must do nothing." It is that the tools used should be the narrowest ones that work. Platform-specific, court-supervised takedown orders with published reasoning. Geographically tight throttling triggered only by an independent judicial finding, with mandatory expiry and parliamentary review. Transparency obligations on telcos — including the state-owned ones — to publish every government order they receive, as a number of African civil-society groups have begun pressing for.
The continent has spent twenty years building out mobile internet, fintech and a continental free-trade area whose digital protocol depends on cross-border connectivity. Treating that infrastructure as a kill switch the executive can flip without oversight is a policy choice. The 2025 data shows the choice is being made more often, not less. Ethiopia, with the longest single shutdown ever recorded on the continent still in living memory, is the case that most clearly illustrates why a course correction is overdue.