Over the past 48 hours, Internet connectivity in Chad has been highly degraded, apparently by attacks from the Anonymous Sudan activist group.
The security media site Dark Reading reports that Anonymous Sudan claimed credit for attacking Sudachad, one of Sudan’s major telecommunications providers.
As noted in our Pulse country report for Chad, the country is ranked very low for Internet resilience, with the result that an attack on a single telecom provider severely impacted Internet connectivity for all.
Measurements of Internet Connectivity In Chad
IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis) showed the outage very clearly in their measurements:
Cloudflare Radar shows a similar drop in traffic, as well as a subsequent drop:
Dark Reading published an article referencing a Telegram channel from the group Anonymous Sudan, where the group claimed credit for conducting an attack against Sudachad, the largest telecommunications provider in Chad. There were multiple reports on X (example) that confirmed these messages were sent.
Chad’s Lack of Internet Resilience
If we look at the Pulse country report for Chad, the country has an Internet Resilience Score of 24% and ranks 46th regionally. It also ranks “Poor” for Transit Provider Diversity and “Very Poor” for Retail ISP Diversity, indicating there are very few choices of Internet access providers for users in Chad.
Of note, the country report also indicates that only 18% of the population of Chad is actively using the Internet, indicating there is substantial room for growth.
From what we can see in current measurements, the attack appears to have been mitigated (or ended), and Internet connectivity has been restored. Hopefully, as more connectivity is added within the country, consideration will be given to increasing resilience so that an attack such as this does not impact Internet access as much as it did today.