Internet Shutdowns

Today Algeria joined Iraq and Syria in shutting down the Internet for the entire country during school exams. Data from Cloudflare Radar and IODA show that Algeria appears to be following a similar pattern to last year, with a longer outage in the morning and then a second outage in the afternoon. As we noted in our post about exam-related shutdowns in 2024, these Baccalaureate exams go from 9-13 June 2024. We expect to see daily shutdowns on these days.

In analyzing the data, it appears that the Algerian government is engaging in content blocking whereby the actual Internet connections remain active, but the Internet service providers are ordered to block certain sites, including social media networks and messaging sites.

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

In a thread in r/algeria on Reddit, a user relayed this story:

I will explain to you one of my former colleagues who worked with me in Dubai in 2023 than he back to Algeria ( Constantine) , He had an interview today via the Zoom platform with a foreign company, and suddenly the internet was cut off. He received an email to postpone the interview for tomorrow. He replied to them and asked to postpone it to next Monday (as the company’s rest days are Saturdays and Sunday) , But the response was negative because they had a certain number of candidates and they must make a decision at the end of the week. As i have some relationships with some of the recruitment team I tried to mediate for him via LinkedIn, but there is no response yet. Question:How many people may have faced such a problem today or may face this week, and how will those who lost an opportunity they have been searching for for years be compensated because of an unjustified decision?

There has not yet been a formal statement from the government of Algeria. In fact, media reports indicated that the Minister of Education had previously stated that there would not be Internet shutdowns this year’s exams. In a session last week, the Minister of Education outlined the operations for the 2024 Baccalaureate exams and did not mention any form of an Internet shutdown. However, without any warning the Internet was shut down in the similar manner to how the government has shut down Internet access in past years during the exams.