Facebook Disappears from the Internet; Globally, People Assume Censorship

Figure 1: People around the world naturally turned to Psiphon in response to the Facebook outage.

Summary:

Psiphon’s global usage surged by 1.75 Million daily unique users during the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021.
The rise was particularly acute in regions where Facebook platforms - including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself - experience regular disruptions due to intermittent, but active censorship.
The regions that saw the most significant increases in usage include several countries where major censorship events have occurred within the past few years: Azerbaijan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Sudan, and Syria.
Cuba showed a 4.6x increase from baseline usage, from 70,000 to over 300,000 daily unique users, reinforcing Psiphon’s important role in the region. In July 2021, the Psiphon network supported a surge of 1.4M users from Cuba during targeted blocking of social media and messaging platforms, a still-immanent threat from censors.
This demonstrates that Psiphon is a key and trusted global connectivity solution.

Shutdown in Myanmar: A Fresh Story with Old Challenges

Supporting 5 million users in Myanmar is no small feat

When the Internet goes dark, so does communication with the rest of the world. We know that many regimes use Internet censorship as a method to suppress public awareness, civil protest, and mobilization, and a shutdown event is often a signal of bad things to come. This means more bad news is lurking around. When the lights of the routers went off in Myanmar, the whole world changed for millions of Burmese...

Amid major network disruptions, 1.76M Psiphon users in Belarus

The Psiphon network supported a peak 1.76 million daily active users during significant network interference that started August 9th, a figure that represents nearly 1 in every 3 internet users.

A large-scale disruption to international internet access was observed in Belarus, beginning during the contested presidential election on August 9th. Widespread filtering was reported across all Belarusian networks, affecting popular messaging apps including Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp; social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube; major app markets including Google Play and the App Store; email providers Gmail, Mail.ru, and Yandex; maps, banking, online media, and many other services. Rolling blackouts of the mobile networks also occurred nightly between 6PM and 6AM. The majority of VPNs were reportedly blocked as a result of generalized SSL/TLS filtering. Tor direct connections were disrupted by the increased network change, while Tor bridge users reached a peak 8,000 per day during the shutdown period. Network outages were tracked by RIPE Labs, Oracle Internet Intelligence, IODA, and other network monitors.

Traceroute completions on main mobile operator MTS Belarus (AS25106) showed clear outages through 60280 and 6697 (source: Oracle)

As a backdrop to the network disruptions, Belarus had entered its largest mass demonstrations in history.