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Sudan woke up without Internet

10/25/2021

2 min read

Today, October 25, following political turmoil, Sudan woke up without Internet access.

In our June blog, we talked about Sudan when the country decided to shut down the Internet to prevent cheating in exams.

Now, the disruption seems to be for other reasons. AP is reporting that "military forces ... detained at least five senior Sudanese government figures.". This afternoon (UTC) several media outlets confirmed that Sudan's military dissolved the transitional government in a coup that shut down mobile phone networks and Internet access.

Cloudflare Radar allows anyone to track Internet traffic patterns around the world. The dedicated page for Sudan clearly shows that this Monday, when the country was waking up, the Internet traffic went down and continued that trend through the afternoon (16:00 local time, 14:00 UTC).

Change in Internet Traffic in Sudan (Last 24 hours)

We dug in a little more on the HTTP traffic data. It usually starts increasing after 06:00 local time (04:00 UTC). But this Monday morning, traffic was flat, and the trend continued in the afternoon (there were no signs of the Internet coming back at 18:00 local time).

HTTP Requests

When comparing today with the last seven days' pattern, we see that today's drop is abrupt and unusual.

Change in Internet Traffic in Sudan (Last 7 days)

We can see the same pattern when looking at HTTP traffic by ASN (Autonomous Systems Number). The shutdown affects all the major ISPs from Sudan.

HTTP requests by ASN

Two weeks ago, we compared mobile traffic worldwide using Cloudflare Radar, and Sudan was one of the most mobile-friendly countries on the planet, with 83% of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices. Today, both mobile and desktop traffic was disrupted.

Devices Traffic

Using Cloudflare Radar, we can also see a change in Layer 3&4 DDoS attacks because of the lack of data.

Network-level DDOS Attacks Originating in Sudan (Last 24 hours)

You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor how we see the Internet traffic globally and in every country.

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Internet TrafficCloudflare RadarInternet ShutdownOutage

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João Tomé|@emot
Celso Martinho|@celso
Cloudflare|@cloudflare

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