For the better part of three years, large parts of Ethiopia have been disconnected from the global internet. The federal government's decision to extend its blackout across the Amhara and Tigray regions into May 2026 has now made it the longest sustained shutdown imposed on Ethiopian citizens since the Tigray war began in 2020. The Access Now-led #KeepItOn coalition and African digital rights groups have once again condemned the measure — and, crucially, are urging the African Union's most influential digital economy, South Africa, to break its diplomatic silence before the precedent hardens into a continental norm.
From a pro-innovation, pro-speech perspective, this is not a distant Horn-of-Africa story. It is a stress test for whether Africa's leading constitutional democracy is willing to defend the open internet when defending it is inconvenient.
What Ethiopia's shutdown actually does
Network measurement groups, including the Open Observatory of Network Interference and Cloudflare Radar, have documented near-total mobile data blackouts and severely degraded fixed-line connectivity across Amhara since mid-2023, with Tigray repeatedly cut off both before and after the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement. Banks, hospitals, humanitarian agencies and small businesses report operating partially blind, with cash-based workarounds and physically transported USB drives substituting for routine digital workflows.
As EFF's Jillian York noted in her April 2026 essay on the rise of network shutdowns, governments increasingly treat the "off switch" as a default tool of public-order policy rather than an exceptional measure. "Iran's internet has been intermittently disrupted for months," she writes, situating Ethiopia within a broader pattern in which shutdowns are paired with surveillance, content blocking and offline crackdowns. EFF's May 2026 hacker's guide to circumventing shutdowns is a useful technical resource, but it is also a tacit admission: states are winning the policy fight, and civil society is being pushed into harm-reduction mode.
Why South Africa matters
South Africa is the continent's most-connected major economy, home to Africa's deepest internet exchange points (NAPAfrica in Johannesburg routinely peaks above 4 Tbps), most of its hyperscale cloud capacity, and a constitutional order that explicitly protects freedom of expression and access to information under sections 16 and 32 of the Constitution. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) licenses operators under the Electronic Communications Act 36 of 2005, which contains no general power to order a population-wide internet shutdown.
That legal posture matters regionally. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, headquartered in Banjul but heavily influenced by South African jurisprudence, adopted its updated Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa in 2019. Principle 38 unambiguously states that governments "shall not engage in or condone" internet shutdowns. The Commission's Resolution 580 (2024) reiterated that shutdowns are incompatible with the African Charter. South African legal scholars helped draft those instruments.
Yet Pretoria has consistently declined to publicly criticise Addis Ababa, citing AU diplomatic convention. That silence is being read — by Zimbabwean, Mozambican and Eswatini officials watching closely — as permission.
The economic case against shutdowns
The pro-innovation case here is not abstract. Independent estimates from the Internet Society and Top10VPN have consistently pegged the cost of African shutdowns in the billions of dollars annually, with Ethiopia alone accounting for a significant share. South African operators MTN and Vodacom, with subsidiaries across the SADC region, lose revenue every time a neighbouring government pulls the plug. Cloud-dependent fintechs operating cross-border — exactly the firms the African Continental Free Trade Area Digital Trade Protocol is supposed to enable — cannot scale into markets where connectivity is a political variable.
Put simply: every additional month Ethiopia stays dark raises the political risk premium on every SADC fibre route, every undersea cable landing, and every data centre investment decision.
What proportionate regulation looks like
None of this means governments are powerless against genuine threats. Targeted, court-supervised, time-limited interventions against specific illegal content or accounts are compatible with international human rights law. Blanket regional shutdowns are not. The test, articulated in the UN's Rabat Plan of Action and echoed by the ACHPR, is necessity and proportionality — and indefinite blackouts of entire ethnic regions fail it on both counts.
South Africa has the diplomatic standing, legal vocabulary and economic interest to lead a regional pushback. Concrete options include:
- Co-sponsoring an AU Peace and Security Council briefing on the humanitarian cost of the Amhara and Tigray shutdowns.
- Tabling implementing guidelines for Principle 38 at the next ACHPR session.
- Conditioning SADC cross-border telecoms cooperation on shutdown-restraint commitments.
- Backing African civil society's call for transparency reporting from telcos operating in shutdown-prone jurisdictions — a measure that would cost Pretoria nothing politically.
The bottom line
EFF's Veridiana Alimonti warned in May 2026 that "poor accountability, feeble control mechanisms, and insufficient legal frameworks" are how surveillance abuses become normalised. The same is true of shutdowns. Each month Pretoria says nothing, the threshold for the next African government to flip the kill-switch drops a little further. South Africa's digital economy — and its constitutional credibility — both depend on raising that threshold back up, not letting it sink quietly into convention.