Day Six of Iraq High School Exam-Related Internet Shutdowns

Iraq

4 July, 2023 01:00 - 05:00 (4 hours)

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.

Data and Analysis

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.

Conversations

12th grade #exams have started in #Iraq, which means another ~5 hour #Internet #shutdown has occurred in Iraq. 12th grade exams are set for June 21, 22 ,24, 25, 26, 27; July 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.

Iraq Internet connectivity in near realtime:https://t.co/3SrU04E7e8 pic.twitter.com/Uz9DFhHQI4

— IODA (@IODA_live) June 21, 2023