How civil society tracks government-ordered Internet blackouts
Government-mandated Internet shutdowns remain a persistent tool for suppressing dissent. Access Now's KeepItOn campaign documented at least 182 shutdowns across 34 countries in 2021 alone, with incidents occurring during protests, elections, and conflicts in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, India, and Iran. Governments deploy a variety of technical methods to achieve these blackouts, including throttling, IP blocking, DNS interference, mobile data shutoffs, and deep packet inspection. The consequences extend beyond censorship: these shutdowns disrupt civic participation, economic activity, and public trust in democratic institutions.
Cloudflare has worked with civil society organizations to build tools for documenting the scale and nature of these disruptions. During Cloudflare Impact Week, the company is highlighting how partners use Radar and its associated alerts to verify shutdowns, archive evidence, and advocate against their use.
From internal alerts to public advocacy tools
Cloudflare launched Radar in 2020 to surface Internet patterns and trends from aggregated network data. Organizations focused on democracy-building and human rights adopted Radar early, using its traffic visualization to monitor country-level connectivity. Cloudflare already maintained an internal alert system for detecting potential disruptions, and conversations with groups including Access Now, Internews, The Carter Center, National Democratic Institute, Internet Society, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems revealed how that capability could serve human rights defenders on the ground.
That feedback led to the 2021 launch of Radar Internet shutdown alerts, which notify subscribers when Cloudflare detects significant traffic drops. Radar 2.0 went further, offering free API access so that academics, journalists, and civil society groups can integrate shutdown data into their own tracking systems. The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center (CROC) archives past outages, making it a reference point for historical analysis.
Access Now: verification as a primary source
Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition, founded in 2016, now represents more than 280 organizations across 105 countries. The STOP Project (Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project) documents shutdowns with a verification process that combines quantitative and qualitative sources. Zach Rosson, #KeepItOn Data Analyst, explains that confirmation may come from technical measurement, news reports, or personal accounts, with an emphasis on understanding how a shutdown was ordered and how it affected society.
Rosson says Radar Internet shutdown alerts, in both email and tweet form, are trusted sources for verifying that a shutdown occurred. The alerts' underlying measurements serve as primary sources in Access Now's annual report dataset. "Cloudflare Radar is sometimes the first place that we hear about a shutdown," he notes, which speeds up rapid response and provides strong evidence when advocating against the practice.
For Radar 2.0 and the API, Access Now plans to accelerate the response, verification, and publication of shutdown data. Rosson says the CROC and its related API endpoint will support timely access to shutdown information, whether through visual inspection now or through pulling data into a centralized database in the long term.
Internet Society Pulse: curated, verified incident pages
Internet Society's Pulse platform curates information around government-mandated shutdowns, using data from multiple trusted sources. Susannah Gray, Director of Communications, says ISOC monitors Internet traffic using Radar and other tools, looking for signs that a shutdown is in progress. To appear on the Pulse Shutdowns Tracker, an event must meet three criteria: it must be artificially induced, as confirmed by reputable sources such as government statements; it must remove Internet access; and it must affect a group of people.
- Be artificially induced, as evident from reputable sources, including government statements and orders.
- Remove Internet access.
- Affect access to a group of people.
Once ISOC rules out technical errors, routing misconfigurations, or infrastructure failures, it prepares an incident page with measurements from trusted data partners. Gray says Radar Internet shutdown alerts are "incredibly useful for bringing incidents to our attention as they are happening." ISOC often uses screenshots of Radar charts on the Pulse shutdowns tracker to illustrate traffic flows, with links back to the Radar platform for deeper data. The organization's aim is accuracy over speed, exploring the economic and social impact of each shutdown.
ISOC intends to incorporate Radar 2.0 and the API into its internal data aggregation tool, combining several alert and monitoring sources into one system for more efficient incident tracking.
OONI: cross-referencing signals of connectivity loss
Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is a nonprofit that measures censorship, including the blocking of websites, messaging apps, and circumvention tools. Cloudflare Radar is one of OONI's main public data sources when examining reported connectivity shutdowns. OONI relied on Radar data when reporting on shutdowns in Iran during the Mahsa Amini protests. In 2022, OONI launched the Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT), which lets the public track censorship worldwide and create charts from its real-time data.
Maria Xynou, OONI Research and Partnerships Director, says the organization checks whether Radar provides signals of a reported shutdown, then compares those signals with other public data sources such as IODA and Google traffic data. OONI partners with digital rights organizations that use its tools to monitor and respond to censorship events in their own regions.
Access and next steps
Cloudflare continues to refine its toolkit based on feedback from human rights organizations. Organizations interested in receiving Radar Internet shutdown alerts can contact [email protected] or follow the Cloudflare Radar alert Twitter page. The Cloudflare Radar Outage Center is available for tracking past outages, and the Radar API is documented at developers.cloudflare.com/radar.
