Kenya has joined the list of African countries that have disrupted their network connection as a means to silence the public in times of political unrest.
According to Surfshark’s Internet Shutdown Tracker, the Kenyan government restricted the internet during the anti-finance bill protests on Tuesday, June 25.
Surfshark live network data showed a major disruption to internet connectivity in Kenya.
In a post at 4:47pn on June 25, the Company said the incident came amidst a deadly crackdown by police on #RejectFinanceBill2024 protesters and a day after authorities claimed there would be no internet shutdowns.
The Company said this was Kenya’s first internet restriction since 2015.
“Amid Kenya’s wide-scale protests over tax increases, the country has restricted the internet. This is the country’s first recorded internet restriction, which tracks cases of government-imposed internet and social media restrictions since 2015,” Surfshark said.
Surfshark explained that the internet disruption impacted Kenya as well as neighboring countries including Uganda and Burundi.
It hinted that the incident was likely to limit coverage of events on the ground where protests were being held.
“While Kenyan network operator Safaricom now states that two of its undersea cables have experienced outages, the root cause of the current internet disruption remains unexplained at the present time,” read another statement by Surfshark.
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Kenya Joins Lits of Other 118 African Countries
Kenya now joins the long list of African nations to have restricted the internet amid political turmoil.
Most recently, Senegal experienced a series of internet restrictions amid the postponement of elections.
According to Surfshark, Africa is the second continent in the world in internet restrictions with 119 cases since 2015, behind only Asia with 620 cases.
Sudan is the number one country in Africa in terms of internet restrictions with 13 recorded cases, followed by Ethiopia with 12 and Senegal with 8.
Likewise, there have been 57 internet restrictions in Africa in response to protests since 2015 in 11 different countries.
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Safaricom Internet Disruption
On the same day, Safaricom said it was experiencing an outage on two of its underseas cables that deliver internet traffic in and out of Kenya.
Safaricom however said it had activated redundancy measures to minimize service interruption and keep customers connected as it was waiting for full restoration of the cables.
“You may, however, experience reduced internet speeds and intermittency on various apps including M-PESA Super App and Safaricom APP,” noted the telco company.
The company further advised customers to use USSD *334# for M-PESA services or the SIM Tool Kit.
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