Internet Kill Switch: Recurring Blackouts in Syria, Iraq, Algeria – And Who’s Next?
Syria has conducted annual nationwide internet shutdowns on high school exam days since 2016, with 2020–2025 patterns showing daily outages of roughly 3.5 to 5.5 hours during exam periods. Syria’s shutdowns use an asymmetric model that allows outbound traffic but blocks inbound responses, making the internet effectively unusable. In Syria, the 2023 exam season produced at least 11 nationwide outages, each about 4 hours long (06:00–10:00), spanning May–June for the first round and late June–July for the second. Iraq began regular exam-related shutdowns in 2023, imposing near-daily four-hour nationwide outages (04:00–08:00) during exams, with a total of 42 outages in