National shutdown

Internet access reportedly remained cut and many social media sites blocked as protesters accused President Alexander Lukashenko of rigging a landslide re-election victory.

Social media platforms and foreign news websites became inaccessible in the morning of election day, August 9, as polls opened. Specific websites like Zubr.in, a grassroots driven platform which allows users to submit reports of electoral law violations via a Telegram bot, as well as independent news outlets Naviny and Tut.By were also blocked.

Data from Monash University’s IP Observatory showed latency spikes from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. local time, coinciding with the voting window. It observed that large number of Internet addresses appeared to have gone offline on August 10 and 11. Network interruptions on these dates were corroborated by Google traffic data. The government is said to have used deep packet inspection technology provided by U.S. company Sandvine Inc. to block SSL traffic at scale, affecting widely used online services, including email and VPNs.

The government had  blamed “foreign cyberattacks,” while the country’s Computer Emergency Response Team pointed to DDoS attacks on government infrastructure as the reason for the blackout. The country’s national telecom company Beltelecom suggested that large volumes of foreign traffic were to blame, and later issued a statement saying that it’s working to resolve the outages caused by "multiple cyberattacks.”

The country’s three largest mobile operators, A1, Life, and MTS, apologized for outages caused by “reasons outside our control,” but offered no further explanation. Data from Oracle Internet Intelligence, the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, RIPE Atlas and Google Transparency Report corroborate local reports of network disruption.

ORACLE INTERNET INTELLIGENCE