Ethiopia restores internet connection, outage roundly rebuked

Saturday June 15, 2019

Reports and posts by social media users indicate that internet connectivity has been restored across Ethiopia on day four of an unexplained government shutdown.

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The internet rights group, NetBlocks, were among the first to report of the outage
on Tuesday (June 11). The cited a possible reason as an ongoing national exams for which authorities had blocked the internet around the same time in 2016 and 2017.

The said exam started this week and is expected to end next week Tuesday, a journalist in Addis Ababa confirmed to Africanews.

The government and state-run operator, Ethio Telecom, have not commented on the issue officially. An Africanews request for information has also gone unanswered.

On Wednesday, text messaging also suffered an outage as people widely reported of an inability to transmit messages. Despite the return of connectivity, SMS remains inaccessible.

Pro-democracy activists and journalists in the country have meanwhile chastised the government for turning off the internet in a time when reforms are being rolled out by the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed-led government.

One activist, Atnaf Brhane, observed that the internet had been shut down for four times in the period that Abiy has been in charge, thrice for politico-security reasons plus the current one.

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