Afghanistan goes offline after Taliban impose ban

"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."

""The cut in access has left Afghanistan almost completely cut off from the outside world, and risks inflicting significant harm on the Afghan people, including by threatening economic stability and exacerbating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises," UNAMA wrote in a Tuesday post. "Such a ban has immediate and far-reaching consequences, including severely impacting the functioning of critical banking and financial systems, further increasing the isolation of women and girls, limiting access to emergency services and medical care, disrupting the aviation sector, and limiting access to remittances for dependent families.""

Afghanistan experienced a near-total collapse of internet and telephone services after traffic waned and then collapsed, with mobile carriers showing drastic reductions. NetBlocks and Cloudflare attribute the outage to government action and link it to recent Taliban restrictions in some provinces citing moral concerns. The outage halted commercial flights, prevented banks from contacting branch offices, and disrupted broadcasters. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan demanded immediate restoration of nationwide communications and warned the cut threatens economic stability, worsens the humanitarian crisis, isolates women and girls, limits emergency and medical access, disrupts banking and remittances, and undermines disaster response after recent earthquakes.

Read at Theregister