Past

National shutdown

After a break of a week, the Iraq government resumed their series of exam-related shutdowns ordered by government authorities to curb cheating during high school exams period. The shutdowns are expected to continued on July 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15 in 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

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Population
45,074,049

Freedom House rates Internet freedom as Partly Free

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Local impact

After a break of a week, the Iraq government resumed their series of exam-related shutdowns ordered by government authorities to curb cheating during high school exams period. The shutdowns are expected to continued on July 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15 in 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.

Other supporting information

Measurements from the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project at Georgia Tech shows the shutdown on 4 July, the sixth in this series of exam-related shutdowns. It is a similar drop to the previous shutdowns, beginning at 01:00 and ending at 05:00 (UTC).

Chart from IODA showing outage on July 4

The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) shows that they did not receive any data from any their test probes in Iraq for a longer period of time.

Chart from OONI showing no data being received from probes in Iraq.

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