30 Apr 2025
The section of Pulse that covers Internet Shutdowns is our most popular by far. We’ve heard from the community that they want it to be easier to show and understand the scale and impact of shutdowns around the world. We’ve taken the first big step in redesigning this section, so that it’s easier to find ongoing shutdowns, explore those that have already happened, and see where the worst offenders are.
What's New
Compare more easily with an interactive bar chart
Maps are great, but the way we were using the map on the overview page made it hard to answer questions like “Who are the worst shutdown offenders?” and “How does my country compare to other countries that have experienced shutdowns?” Now you can see stats for countries by the total number of individual shutdowns, or sort by cumulative number of shutdown hours. It’s more colorful, too.
Understand the recent global picture with contextual data
Every shutdown is a net negative on the global Internet, but the data on our old overview page didn’t help to emphasize that. Now you can get an at-a-glance overview of the global picture of shutdowns as they are today, and over the past 12 months.
See what’s happening now with “ongoing” filter
Shutdowns can last anywhere from a few hours to a number of years. Using reverse chronology on the overview page makes it easy to see the shutdowns that have started most recently, but ongoing shutdowns that started years ago—such as in Ethiopia and Palestine—got buried too easily. Now you can filter the list and see only the shutdowns that are going on right now, which will make it easier to see the current picture, including some of the most severe, longest-running shutdowns.
Improvements
Added clickable cards for easier scanning
In the old version, the most prominent element was the name of the country, which made it hard to distinguish shutdowns from one another, especially for repeat offenders like India and Iraq. We’ve addressed this by adding clickable cards designed to make the country easy to identify, and also to show you the type of shutdown, along with a short summary about that shutdown, so you can see where you might want to click through to the page for more information. We also added a component that makes it easier to distinguish ongoing shutdowns from those that have ended.
Shutdown detail pages now offer more country-level context
Each shutdown gets its own detail page but it can be hard to connect the dots without contextual information, especially for users looking at shutdowns from countries they’re not familiar with. We’ve added some contextual data from the Country Reports to each detail page, as well as a link to see the country’s shutdown history in a list.
More structure on the detail pages
We condensed some of the sections on the shutdown detail pages and renamed them. “Cause documentation” is now “related documentation”, “conversations” and “experiences” are now combined into “social media”, and “data and analysis” is now called “other supporting information.” We had too many sections and they were being used differently by different page authors, so this should make things easier to understand.
Spruced up the user interface for our mobile users
It’s now easier on mobile. No more fussy map zoom, just a really clear scroll and a design that’s friendlier for smaller screens.
Other Updates
Improved the geographical picture by removing the map
The map on the previous version of the overview page was hard to navigate, which made it a less-than-ideal way to show the geographical picture of shutdowns. It was interactive in places that weren’t intuitive, and wasn’t interactive in places people expected. We also heard from users that a world map with lots of blank space on it made it too easy to see shutdowns as a problem confined to only a handful of countries, and that it distorts the data based on the size of a country’s land area. We’re looking at better and more usable ways to involve maps.
Made the page more intuitive by removing elements that weren’t usable
We removed two sections on the overview page that we know weren't very usable. The playable timeline was difficult to understand. When you played the timeline, you couldn’t see both the timeline and the map within the same view, so it made things confusing. We also removed the “search” and replaced it with a country dropdown.