Q3 Opens With Disruptions Across Four Countries

Cloudflare Radar's monitoring of global Internet health continued into the third quarter of 2024. The first month of Q3 saw significant disruptions in Bangladesh, Syria, Pakistan, and Venezuela, ranging from government-mandated shutdowns to technical failures and election-related traffic shifts.

BLOG-3030 hero image

Bangladesh: From Protests to a Near-Total Blackout

Violent student protests over government job quotas and unemployment led the Bangladeshi government to order a nationwide mobile Internet shutdown on July 18, reportedly to "ensure the security of citizens." What began as a mobile-only restriction expanded into a near-complete national outage as broadband networks were also taken offline.

Country-level Internet traffic dropped to near zero just before 21:00 local time (15:00 UTC). Announced IP address space from Bangladesh also fell to near zero at that point, effectively disconnecting nearly every network in the country.

Leading up to the full shutdown, several major providers experienced isolated outages that foreshadowed the broader blackout:

  • AS24389 (Grameenphone): A complete outage began at 01:30 local time on July 18 (19:30 UTC on July 17), with total loss of traffic and routing.
  • AS45245 (Banglalink): Outage started at 02:15 local time (20:15 UTC on July 17), with traffic and announced IP space dropping to zero.
  • AS24432 (Robi Axiata): Disruption observed from around 06:30 local time (00:30 UTC) on July 18.
  • AS58715 (Earth Telecommunication): Traffic began falling at 18:00 local time (12:00 UTC) on July 18, reaching zero four hours later; routing was fully withdrawn by 21:25 local time (15:25 UTC).
  • AS63526 (Carnival Internet): Lost traffic at 20:45 local time (14:45 UTC), with all announced IP address space withdrawn over the following hour.

In the days before the shutdown, country-level median bandwidth and latency were stable. However, during the outage, Cloudflare Radar's Internet Quality measurements showed a clear increase in median bandwidth and a concurrent drop in median latency. This is likely due to the loss of measurements from mobile network providers as they disconnected.

Broadband restoration began on July 23, five days after the full shutdown. The initial phase was described as a "trial run," prioritizing banking, commercial sectors, technology firms, exporters, outsourcing providers, and media outlets. Announced IP address space and traffic volumes began to rise around 19:00 local time (13:00 UTC) as selected networks reconnected.

Later phases of restoration were staggered. Traffic on AS63526 (Carnival Internet) and AS58715 (Earth Telecommunication) began increasing around 06:00 local time (00:00 UTC) on July 27. Mobile providers were slower to recover: traffic on AS24389 (Grameenphone), AS45245 (Banglalink), and AS24432 (Robi Axiata) only began growing significantly around 15:00 local time (09:00 UTC) on July 28.

Syria: Exam Shutdowns and an Air Conditioner Incident

Syria's recurring exam-related Internet shutdowns returned in late July for a second round of nationwide tests. Syrian Telecom published the schedule on its Facebook page, and the disruptions are clearly visible in traffic and routing data for July 25, 28, 29, and 30.

Shortly after the planned shutdown on July 30, an additional disruption appeared. According to a translated Facebook post from Syrian Telecom, "while performing regular maintenance on one of the air conditioners located in one of the technical halls [data centers], an explosion occurred, causing the Internet circuits to temporarily go out of service." This incident caused an approximately eight-hour outage between 11:00 and 19:00 local time (08:00–16:00 UTC), visible in both traffic and announced IP address space for AS29256 (Syrian Telecom).

Pakistan: A Two-Hour Widespread Drop

On July 31, Pakistan experienced a two-hour disruption between 13:30 and 15:30 local time (08:30–10:30 UTC). Country-level traffic dropped only ~45%, but the impact on two major providers was severe: AS17557 (PTCL) saw a near-complete loss of traffic, while AS24499 (Telenor Pakistan) dropped nearly 90%. Together, these providers serve an estimated nine million users.

The cause remains disputed. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) attributed the disruption to a technical glitch in an international submarine cable affecting PTCL's network. A separate report, however, suggested that "the government's latest firewall edition to block the content was misconfigured, resulting in Internet connectivity disruption."

TCP reset/timeout data from Cloudflare Radar (forthcoming at the time of this analysis) may support the firewall theory. During the disruption window, increased numbers of connections were terminating immediately after the initial SYN packet, while the overall rate of SYN packets arriving at Cloudflare remained mostly consistent. This pattern—SYN traffic steady but other TCP packets dropping—suggests a filtering mechanism rather than a connectivity loss. The PTA's own Facebook post stated only that the issue was resolved and that "the exact issue is being investigated by PTA to avoid such instances in future."

Regardless of cause, the impact on financial markets was immediate. A published report noted: "The KSE-100 index suffered a sharp decline on Wednesday, plummeting over 740 points in the final hour of trading amid a nationwide internet outage. Analysts attributed the sudden drop to panic selling as investors struggled with limited market data."

Following the contested presidential election on July 28, Venezuela did not implement a government-directed Internet shutdown, even though protests sprang up afterward. However, Cloudflare Radar observed several notable traffic drops compared to the same times the previous week.

Election day began with a surge: traffic was 35% higher at 05:00 local time (09:00 UTC), but then dropped by as much as 23% at 09:00 local time (13:00 UTC) after polls opened. The following day, July 29, traffic was up to 28% lower than the prior week at both 06:15 local time (10:15 UTC) and 18:45 local time (22:45 UTC).

These observed drops appeared organic rather than caused by shutdowns. Still, censorship is active: an Internet Society Pulse blog post published two days before the election reported that "around 60 websites are currently blocked in Venezuela, including eight media sites and three that fact-check news and misinformation," citing data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI).