A blackout arrives with the drones
Weekly conflict-monitoring reports for June 22-28, 2026 recorded telecommunications shutdowns in Gida-Ayana Woreda, East Wollega Zone, Oromia Region, alongside drone strikes in the same woreda and neighboring Kiremu, plus fresh civilian casualties, as fighting between federal forces and Fano and Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) fighters continued across Oromia and Amhara. The connectivity cut is not incidental to the violence — it is Ethiopia's default response to it.
Not an incident. A pattern.
Ethiopia has one of the worst shutdown records on the continent. The #KeepItOn coalition — over 300 organizations across 105 countries — has documented "at least 26 documented incidents since 2016" tied to conflict and political unrest, and Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 report scores the country 30 out of 100, "Not Free," citing localized Oromia shutdowns throughout its June 2024-May 2025 coverage window on top of the roughly year-long Amhara blackout that cut mobile internet and phone lines in 19 cities from August 2023 until officials lifted it in July 2024. Before that, Tigray endured a two-year, near-total blackout from November 2020 to November 2022. Gida-Ayana is not a new tactic; it is the same tool, redeployed to a new front.
Steelmanning the blackout
The government's implicit case deserves a fair hearing before it's rejected. Ethiopia is fighting an active, multi-front insurgency: Fano units clash with federal and Oromo Prosperity Party-aligned forces across more than 35 administrative divisions in ten-plus zones, OLA carries out abductions in areas like North Shewa's Dera Woreda, and the Ethiopian National Defense Force has leaned on drones — some assembled from Chinese components — that have hit fuel markets, health facilities, and residential areas. In that environment, a government can plausibly argue that live networks let armed groups coordinate ambushes, geolocate troop movements in real time, and amplify disinformation that inflames ethnic violence faster than any counter-message can travel. Militaries elsewhere restrict communications in active combat zones for exactly these reasons, and Addis Ababa is not wrong that connectivity has genuine operational-security implications during a shooting war.
Where the justification breaks down
The problem is that Ethiopia never actually makes this argument in a reviewable form. The Ethiopian Communications Authority and the Information Network Security Administration — which was placed under the Prime Minister's direct oversight in 2021 — have never published the legal criteria, statutory authority, or duration limits governing a shutdown order. UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye found the same gap after his 2019 mission: no government official could articulate a legal basis for the shutdowns then, and none exists in public form now. A blackout imposed for identifiable operational reasons, time-limited to the specific woreda in active combat, and lifted the moment fighting recedes is defensible. A blackout imposed by unpublished order, with no stated end condition, that in Amhara's case ran for a full year and that Freedom House still logs recurring in Oromia a year later, is not proportionate — it's indefinite collective punishment of everyone in the blast radius, including the humanitarian workers, remittance-dependent families, and journalists documenting the same abuses the government would rather not have documented.
The accountability gap
The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights tried to close this gap with Resolution 580 (adopted at its 78th session, February-March 2024), which calls on states to "take the necessary legislative and other measures to ensure open and secure internet access before, during and after elections" and to "refrain from ordering the interruption of telecommunications services." But as CIPESA's analysis of the resolution notes, it carries no enforcement mechanism — "without clear punitive measures and enforcement mechanisms, the Commission's resolutions continue to suffer impunity." Gida-Ayana is also outside an election window, so even a strengthened Resolution 580 wouldn't reach it; conflict-driven shutdowns need their own accountability track, and none currently exists with teeth.
The cost is not abstract
Globally, government-imposed shutdowns cost an estimated $19.7 billion in 2025 — a 156% jump over 2024 — across 28 countries, per top10vpn.com's Cost of Internet Shutdowns tracker. Ethiopia's own shutdowns have repeatedly disrupted banking, blocked humanitarian coordination for displaced people, and — per the #KeepItOn coalition's 2023 open statement — accompanied mass arrests and journalist detentions that a functioning network would have made harder to conceal, not easier to commit.
What proportionate would look like
A pro-innovation, security-conscious policy does not require choosing between military necessity and an open internet. It requires Ethiopia to publish the legal instrument authorizing each shutdown, scope it geographically to the specific conflict zone rather than entire zones or regions, attach a hard time limit subject to judicial or parliamentary review, and restore service the moment the stated operational justification lapses. Nothing about the Gida-Ayana shutdown suggests any of that discipline is being applied — and until it is, every blackout will look less like counter-insurgency and more like what the evidence keeps showing: an unaccountable kill switch reached for by default.