INTERNET AND SMS SERVICE DISRUPTIONS IN ETHIOPIA
(Posted 14th June 2019)
Information has come to light, difficult to obtain due to the circumstances, that Ethiopia this week suffered major downtime for both internet services and later on also for SMS services across the country’s single mobile network.
Neither has the Ethiopian government nor monopoly communications provider Ethio Telecom given any explanation about the outage, which has reportedly affected mostly private users, though large state corporations are by the look of it still able to communicate.
Across Africa have governments at times resorted to block internet access, mostly during politically challenging times, though no such events are presently being witnessed in Ethiopia.
One source attributed the outages to attempts by government to block communcations between students sitting for national exams and outside ‘help’ though this too could not be independently confirmed.
