A Nation Disconnected: The Onset of the Blackout
Afghanistan has shut down the internet, disconnecting millions from the global community. The gradual descending internet connectivity has reached a complete disconnect, resulting in a telecoms outage. Since the Taliban regained power in August, this is the first time a communication shutdown so aggressive has occurred, and it is a clear indicator of their increasing digital oppression.
According to NetBlocks, the collapse of the internet has Blackout status. The repercussions of this Blackout for the 43m people in the country is devastating, especially given the ongoing humanitarian crises and the fact that it is considered an basic human right.
Control Measures Put in Place to Maintain Order
We cannot forget that the internet blackout did not just begin the way that it did. Earlier this month, Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada issued an order to prohibit the provision of fiber optics services for the sake of “avoiding immorality.” Local authorities, including the governor of the Balkh province, confirmed an order for a national internet blackout, stating that an alternative system “will be established within the country for essential needs.” Although people are isolating, no information has been released to clarify what this system entails. These people are not the only ones affected by this information. There has been a purposeful blackout done in order to serve a policy of information control.
People Paying For The Price of the Digital Blackout.
Rifts forming.
The most devastating part of the blackout is the human connection that is lost. Many Afghans living outside are now not able to connect with their relatives living in Afghanistan, and because of that, they are full of dread and panic. Afghans exiled in Delhi have had their peace of mind disturbed by the worries of thousands, with one stating, “From yesterday, there is no communication with a single person…There is no means to talk.
Some have captured the anguish people are enduring with losing a single voice. There is no means to talk, to make sure that they are safe or not,” For journalist Wahida Faizi, who is in Damark, “As of this moment, it has only been few hours since the internet got cut off in Afghanistan and already it feels like a lifetime.”
The disconnect with people creates anxiety. The black does allow you to hear the voices of people and it evokes a deep sense of loss. Hearng that voice in that moment means a lot in this case. The Extreme is the migration. Dhaka is full with memoirs full of agony. There are people with heavy hearts and a lot of worries.
A Disruption to Education as well as Women’s Rights
There is a serious problem for women and girls’ education due to this blackout. Educators overseas and charitable organizations offered online classes to girls for free after the Taliban prohibited girls’ education beyond grade six. This blackout makes this opportunity vanish and perpetuates the stagnation of a generation’s personal and intellectual growth. Women’s Rights Activist and co-founder of Women for Afghan Women (WAW) Sabena Chaudhry stated the blackout is “not only silencing millions of Afghans devoted to this struggle, but extinguishing their lifeline as well.”
This means the organization has also been unable to communicate with its staff active within the country and thus, is unable to carry out vital humanitarian efforts. This reinforces the existing obstacles Afghan women have to overcome as a result of the already enduring physical barriers imposed on them.
The Impact of a Global Pattern of Digital Isolation and the Information Blackout on Operational Activities and the Media
Afghanistan is suffering a blackout that goes beyond the world of electricity, operating on a level that other regions, including Kabul, cannot grasp. TOLO News TV, an Afghan television network, has reported extreme losses on the blackout and other global banched agencies like Associated Press and Agence France Press cannot reach their Kabul offices. Press liberty champions like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Committee to Protect Journalists talk about the collision of state secrets and the prevention of access that has fuelled a world wide blockade of information.
The Press Freedom Foundation has showcased a worrying tendency to granulate information which, in democracies and open societies, maps the landscape of censorship. Lack of information voids the world of any global perspective and reduces the Afghan citizens to the status of untouchables. This absence of acknowledgment and nuisance, where the boundary shrinks to nothing. All responsibility stops, and, in this morbid state, the information ‘suffocates’.
There Ain’t No Internet in the World
The Afghan case does not swim alone in the pool of excluded country… they swim in a stream of censorship made solid in the second quarter of 2025 that reached Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Panama. Automated censorship of Iran ‘s internet is calculated boredom zone and “specially designated zones” where their ‘cyber defense’ operates on ‘shield mode’ protecting from the utmost anticipated digital armadas.
The Iraq case is way more primal where during national examinations an Internet K.O. applied to ‘assured’ the works of a ‘school of honesty’. But Afghanistan is telling an awful story of border-less censorship, where the depth of tyranny rises above the horizon. This is the thin line of the latest form of soft censorship to pop open the world of digital Stalinism.
The Technical Anatomy of a Blackout
How a Total Blackout is Enforced
Afghanistan is a uniquely digitally disconnected country. It is exceeded in disconnections by a sophisticated system of digital curtains spanning Nations it has a far more isolated and disconnected digital situation almost in a paradoxical sense. To a country like Afghanistan its digital isolation is achieved by OFG cables from Tolo News. By slicing the internal structure at the cables at the required inter connectors discontinues the data flow and it is like a digital stupor. It also differs from the world in the India paralysis. It is not of abdication but of policy. It is a severed aprotic system in policy.
The Search for Alternatives and the Starlink Question
Amidst the suffocating blackout, a few have turned to tech to potentially help solve the problem. Mariam Solaimankhil, an official of the Afghan government in exile, reached out to Elon Musk on X. She wrote, “Starlink is the only way to break the chains of Taliban censorship.” Starlink is a satellite internet constellation that could get around the ground infrastructure needed to provide connectivity. However, and rather shockingly, Starlink is not available in Afghanistan. This gives the people little to no options on how to get around the blackout and showcases how unrestrained the digital blockade is from the state.
Broader effects of a blackout
As always, a blackout has far-reaching consequences, most of which, are still yet to be understood. First, there is the impact on the economy. They disrupt financial transactions, and aid coordination, disconnect Afghanistan professionals and businesses and the rest of the world, and socially isolate the country. In addition, the “fear and intimidation” greatly captured by a UN report, gets enhanced by this isolation. The country or citizens of a country without the ability to talk, transact or conduct business down the line are arguably the most disconnected and vulnerable people on the planet.
They are likely going to suffer and be exposed to the overlapping set of humanitarian and economic crises, which are likely to worsen. The consequences of a blackout is not only an issue of communication, it is a multi-layered problem.
April 26th 2023. A conflict with a blackout. DayFive. S. Hybreab. Blackouts. Lebanon. The Future of a Blackout. The Future A Work
Blackouts. The term often evokes a forgotten or unused time in history. These lost moments are often repeated as shadow gaps in a narrative that may or may not paint a complete picture. Blackouts may very well span a length of time in which a nation or a society discards or chooses not to record a certain epoch in its history. The length and the consequences of such gaps in a narrative are important to take into account. A blackout or a series of them may define an era of conflict or a major technological advancement previously thought lost forever to the sands of time.
Blackouts are more than just gaps. They bring a distance in perception. A change in behavior. A change in abnormal psychology. A collapse of attention that demands a bridge to cross. The change blackouts may present the world with advances in circumstances. Whether these circumstances are socially or technologically imaginative matters in the world of humanity as we roll into the glitch we navigate in the past and the present. The fear is that such avalanches of change may pivot the world into a disconnected dystopia.
Blackouts are a real loss. They evolve the world into a more dystopian version of its history. They add distance to the geometry of every inner and outer structure. The harsh truth of the world is that it may very well morph and evolve into something far more sinister than a predicted horror. A sad aspect of this dystopian picture is that this next world we will find ourselves in may as well have been predicted. Modernity and the world of technology as we define it have deemed the very essence of our existence as an equation to solve.
An equation we solve daily to predict the future with definitive answer, the mere solution of which rests in our blind faith that we shall overcome holocausts to come. Such blind faith is held till the moment when the blackouts disband the evolution of which we are left disconnected.
Every civilization, society or a nation, changes. The reason civilization evolves is because the populace works hard to complete it. Great works come to fruition thanks to the will of the populace and a hierarchy painstakingly formed to reach the very tip of a tower. The civilization rests on a slit of structure, hovering uncertainly on the compass of time. The past, the present, are its unsteady base, and the future outweigh, impose fracture and tremor on the civilization.
These spindly pillars meet at the base of the lifesaver, which is progress to slice the civilization in absense. An equilibrium ceases to exist if the lifeboat of future is not created. The collapse may shed light to the blackouts, rest the ghosts of a past lost, rest and drown with it echoes.
Civilizations bleed. With time, regions or entire nations become blacked out. The record. The centers of civilization span every form of life and each form. These records tell the true history of civilization builders and extenders, progress and development – the history that the past holds, the present breathes, and the horizon hopes. These pillars of light are warm because they exist in our rationality and imagination, and they are crafted with hard work and effort. These structures breath and wake the sanguine spirit of transformation. Loneliness within every particle of these real and lost worlds, is a ghost.
Africa glimpses blackouts today. There are regions, entire nations, hard hit with a tangible loss of progress. Ivory Coast. In our time, we miss the crossing of such ghostly rivers, the epochs afloat, as they disappear into the sea formed by strained rapture of the world. Such an epoch echoes behind a fine veil of exploding systems, every part of which breathes within moments of history.
There sits the fatigue of a world where the new has yet to unfold, where every change burns the past and hopes to wear in threads of something beyond imagination. Each time Africa overwhelms an epoch to light, the vultures that hover remind us of what we drought ourselves to – dystopia. The collapse of civilization, a conquest erasing the very existence of the blood our ancestors shed.
Blackouts gnaw at our humanity. They paint a civilization’s loss with broken history. Inhabiting these silhouettes is a veil that brings fracture to breath. Slowing the spindles to collapse an entire epoch demands, the reach to the transcendental grace powers every ghost. These blacked out rivers are the real drone light in this world folding shadows backward, erasing existence. In gaps well calculated, darkness births. Every line an anvil of history. The consequences – touch slower and with more grace. These kernels of blackouts held us in time and ask.. ‘You are the world, when will you hold yourself’?
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/29/asia/internet-blackout-afghanistan-latam-intl
For more incredible stories of everyday news, return to our homepage.
