Afghanistan has plunged into near-total digital darkness after the Taliban ordered fibre-optic internet lines severed in several provinces. According to watchdog group NetBlocks, connectivity dropped to just 14% of normal levels, signalling a nationwide blackout. The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis, a project by. In 2025, we observed over 180 Internet disruptions spurred by a variety of causes – some were brief and partial, while others were complete outages lasting for days. In the fourth quarter, we tracked only a single government-directed Internet shutdown, but multiple cable cuts wreaked havoc on. The Internet Outages Map is an at-a-glance visualization of global Internet health over the last 24 hours, tracking Internet outages across ISPs, top application providers, public clouds, and edge service networks. The disruption was also felt in the United Arab Emirates, where users of internet providers Du and Etisalat reported slow. Afghanistan was cut off from the global communications network on Sunday night after all fibre-optic internet services and telecommunications systems across the country were abruptly shut down.
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