Past

National shutdown

Internet Services

Another four-hour shutdown of the Internet for everyone in Iraq, in the Iraq government's belief that this will reduce cheating during high school exams. The shutdowns are expected to continue on July 15 2023. As we have repeatedly written about here on Pulse, Internet shutdowns cause great harm to a country’s economy and society, and are in our opinion NOT the appropriate mechanism to cope with potential exam cheating.

  • Total Duration 4 hours

Flag of Iraq Iraq

Population
47,020,774

Freedom House rates Internet freedom as Partly Free

View full country profile for Iraq

Local impact

Another four-hour shutdown of the Internet for everyone in Iraq, in the Iraq government's belief that this will reduce cheating during high school exams. The shutdowns are expected to continue on July 15 2023. As we have repeatedly written about here on Pulse, Internet shutdowns cause great harm to a country’s economy and society, and are in our opinion NOT the appropriate mechanism to cope with potential exam cheating.

Related documentation

Below is a screenshot of the Iraq High School exam schedule for June and July 2023 as per the Iraqi Ministry of Education page on Facebook.

Iraq Primary School exam schedule for June 2023
Iraq Primary School exam schedule for June 2023

Other supporting information

Measurements from the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project at Georgia Tech shows a the shutdown on July 12 following a similar pattern to the previous shutdowns, beginning at 01:00 and ending at 05:00 (UTC).

Chart from IODA showing the Internet Shutdown on July 12

Social media

Shutdown history

  • 29 shutdowns in the last 12 months
  • 171 shutdowns since 2019
  • 14,325 shutdown hours since 2019

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