Taliban impose tele-ban and takes Afghanistan offline

Afghanistan has dropped off the global internet.

Outage-watchers NetBlocks and Cloudflare both attribute the outage to government action, a reasonable assumption given that the Taliban who rule Afghanistan recently cut off internet access in some provinces, citing the need to curb immoral behaviour.

NetBlocks and Cloudflare both observed internet traffic to Afghanistan waning on Monday, before traffic in and out of the country collapsed later that day. NetBlocks reports that telephone services are also down. Cloudflare spotted a drastic reduction in traffic from local mobile carriers.

Afghan news outlet TOLOnews has used its X account to report that the outage has halted all commercial flights to Afghanistan, and means local banks can’t contact their branch offices. Broadcasters have also encountered difficulties, TOLOnews reports.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has called on the Taliban “to immediately and fully restore nationwide internet and telecommunications access.”

“The cut in ...