- The Mozambique government ordered for the Internet to be suspended in the country several times following the disputed national election in October 2025.
- Data from IODA and Cloudflare shows how these restrictions affected the Internet traffic from local Internet Service Providers and different regions in the country.
- These results help validate previous research that shows that Internet shutdowns are significantly more likely to occur in autocratic societies, during political events such as elections or protests.
On 9 October, Mozambique held general elections where voters headed to the polls to elect the president, 250 members of the Assembly of the Republic, and members of ten provincial assemblies. Several election observers, including the European Union, pointed to irregular counting and expressed concerns over whether Mozambique held free and fair elections.
On 24 October, the country’s election commission announced Daniel Chapo of the Frelimo party was the presidential winner. In response to the announcement, Venâncio Mondlane, an independent candidate backed by the opposition party Podemos, called for protests against the allegedly rigged elections.
Protests throughout October and November coincided with Internet disruption and what appears to be Internet shutdowns from IODA data and partners. The government did not announce it had shut down the Internet until 12 November, when the Minister of Transport and Communications admitted the Mozambican government restricted Internet access “to avoid the destruction of the country.”
Restricting access to the Internet limits the right to information enshrined in the Mozambican constitution.
This isn’t the first time Mozambique has been under scrutiny for election and democratic concerns. In Mozambique’s 2019 general election and the 2023 local elections, voters experienced Internet shutdowns and election fraud. According to elections monitoring group Plataforma DECIDE, the ongoing protests from October 2024 to January 2025 have led to the deaths of 300 people, with police firing on peaceful protestors on 16 October.
Internet Connectivity
Country Level
Overall, IODA measurements show a steady decline in Internet connectivity in Mozambique at the start of the protest, with additional shorter periods of outages throughout late October and November.
At the start of the protests in Mozambique on 21 October, IODA began to see abnormal drops at the country level in the number of networks responsive to IODA’s probes, giving us a measure of networks connected to the global Internet in Mozambique.
We first saw abnormal drops on 20 and 21 October, but connectivity levels recovered. On 23 October and again on 31 October, connectivity levels dropped without a recovery to the normal baseline (Figure 1, solid black line). This demonstrates an overall decay or lowered level of Internet connectivity in Mozambique. Then, from 5 to 10 November, we see evidence of daily outages.
Internet Service Provider Level
The outages from 5 to 12 November are even more apparent at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Autonomous System (AS) level, particularly for Movitel (AS37342) and TMCEL (AS30619). Figure 2 shows the Active Probing values for Movitel, with red bands representing repeated outages during which we see drops in Movitel’s reachability, indicating a loss in connectivity.
Figure 3 shows the values of the Routing Announcement, also known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), for TMCEL. These show abnormal drops on 25-26 October and 31 October and nightly drops on 4, 5, 7, and 8 November. The Routing Announcement signal is usually very stable at ~100%, so small drops can have a large impact on Internet users’ connectivity.
If we look at traffic on TMCEL from Cloudflare Radar data during this same time (Figure 4), we can further see how drops in Routing Announcement mirror significant drops in network traffic for TMCEL (AS30619).
Regional level
Cloudflare Radar data also shows disruptions in Maputo City and Nampula on 25-26 October and 4-8 November. Figures 5 and 6 depict the levels of HTTP requests in Maputo City and Nampulo.
HTTP requests are messages sent when users request data over the Internet. The signal typically has a clear diurnal pattern, peaking during the day and dropping at night. The red arrows indicate where HTTP requests were lower than usual for Maputo City and Nampula. We note that other regions may have been impacted, but our data is most complete and clear for these two regions of Mozambique.
Cause of Internet Outages
While IODA data cannot infer the cause of an outage in terms of whether an abnormal drop is caused by government-directed or “spontaneous,” meaning an outage caused by another phenomenon such as weather, network misconfiguration, or power outage, we have conducted research that tells us more about the signatures of shutdowns. This research shows that shutdowns are significantly more likely to occur in autocratic societies, during political events such as elections or protests, and also more likely to occur precisely one, two, three, or four days after a previous shutdown compared to a “spontaneous shutdown.” Applying these findings to the case of Mozambique, we can see that these outages show both political and technical signatures of shutdowns.
IODA has been working with Amnesty International to support its full report on human rights violations during the protest. We will share the full report once it is published. Follow IODA on Bluesky and Mastodon, or contact the IODA team via ioda-info@cc.gatech.edu to discuss any of the items mentioned in this blog.
Contributors: Tara Kelly (IODA), David Belson (Cloudflare)
Adapted from the original version which first appeared on the IODA Blog.
Amanda Meng is a social scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on data and democracy, ethnographies of data literacy and critical consciousness, and ethics and feminist theory.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internet Society.
Photo via facebook.com/ParlamentoMoz