Governments that cut connectivity during school exams are responding to a real problem. Leaked papers and organised cheating can wreck the credibility of a certificate that decides university places and careers, and ministries that run high-stakes national exams are right to treat that as a public-integrity issue. The question is whether a blunt order to switch off a country is a proportionate answer. Access Now's #NoExamShutdown report card, published on 27 October 2026, suggests it increasingly is not, and that governments are starting to act on that. It also shows how easily the practice mutates when it is not formally prohibited.
What the 2026 record shows
The report says Iraq's exam-related shutdowns are "now in their 11th consecutive year, with 2026 adding at least 34 documented disruptions," drawn from Cloudflare Radar and Internet Society Pulse data. Sudan, for a sixth consecutive year, ordered 10 internet shutdowns between 13 and 23 April. The Internet Society's Pulse analysis of Sudan found traffic dropping between 13:45 and 17:15 local time. It tied that to MTN Sudan's statement that it would suspend services on exam days "in accordance with government directives." Pulse adds that exam suspensions have been the main reason for the shutdowns it has tracked globally since 2023.
The movement is not all in one direction. Access Now reports that Syria, for the first time in at least a decade, had no documented exam-related shutdowns, and that Algeria limited its measures to the inside of exam centres without disconnecting the rest of the country. Those are real concessions, and they show that exam security and national connectivity can be separated.
Narrower tools, same weak accountability
The two new developments are more troubling than they look. Access Now says Tunisia "joined the offender list for the first time," imposing what it calls covert restrictions during both Baccalaureate sessions. The evidence is OONI anomaly data pointing to mobile disruptions affecting WhatsApp and Messenger. That is an inference from measurement data, not a published order, which is exactly the point: a restriction nobody announces cannot be challenged in court, audited by a legislature, or planned around by a hospital or a small business.
Jordan took the opposite route and announced its plan. On 23 July, according to the report, its Telecommunications Regulatory Commission said IP-based messaging apps would be blocked near schools hosting the Tawjihi exams, during exam hours only. Localisation is genuinely better than a national blackout, and Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 entry notes a similar June 2024 block was confined to exam hours. But a geographic block near a school still hits every resident, shopkeeper and parent within range, and it still rests on an administrative announcement rather than a statute that sets limits, review and remedy.
This is the pattern worth naming. A shutdown order is an emergency-style power exercised through telecom regulators and licensed operators, usually without legislative scrutiny. When political pressure pushes against the most visible version, governments trade it for a less visible one. Reducing the footprint is progress. It is not the same as constraining the power.
The standard governments have already accepted
The international benchmark is not obscure. The Human Rights Council's 2021 resolution on human rights on the Internet, adopted as 47/16 after being tabled as draft A/HRC/47/L.22, "condemns unequivocally measures in violation of international human rights law that prevent or disrupt an individual's ability to seek, receive or impart information online, including Internet shutdowns and online censorship." The same text stresses that security and public-order measures must respect "lawfulness, legitimacy, necessity and proportionality."
The UN High Commissioner's follow-up report, A/HRC/50/55, defines shutdowns to include not only full cut-offs but also "obstructing the accessibility and usability of services," such as social media and messaging. It notes that governments are increasingly throttling bandwidth or blocking specific services, and that shutdowns "inevitably affect many users with legitimate pursuits." That definition covers Tunisia's reported app interference and Jordan's school-zone blocks as clearly as it covers Iraq's morning blackouts. The report also lists students missing entrance exams among the harms a shutdown can cause, which is a pointed irony for a measure justified in the name of exams.
What proportionate policy would look like
A pro-innovation, pro-speech reading does not require dismissing exam integrity. It requires asking whether the cheapest tool is also the least harmful one, and the 2026 evidence says it is not. Algeria's pivot to exam-centre-only measures and Syria's abstention show that security can be handled at the point of the exam: controlled paper distribution, device bans and screening in the room, staggered or rotated question sets. These remedies address leaks at the source rather than punishing the whole network for a few bad actors.
The costs of the blunt approach are also growing. Access Now's separate KeepItOn count recorded at least 313 shutdowns in 52 countries in 2025, the highest total the coalition has recorded. Each exam-season blackout normalises a tool that is then easier to reach for in elections and protests.
Three practical standards follow. First, any order to restrict connectivity or services should be written, published in advance, time-limited and tied to a statutory basis, which would end the Tunisia-style covert model. Second, regulators should justify necessity and publish the less-intrusive alternatives they considered, as the UN's proportionality test demands. Third, app-level and localised blocks should be treated as shutdowns for reporting and review purposes, rather than as a loophole.
Bottom line
Syria and Algeria deserve credit, and Access Now is right to call the picture mixed. But a narrower shutdown still bypasses the people it affects, and a covert one bypasses accountability entirely. Until governments bind these powers in law rather than merely in restraint, the next exam season will bring a new variant of the old order.