📡 Radar Bulletin: Disruptions in Ukraine (ongoing), Iran, Sudan, Australia, WhatsApp

Hello and welcome to our second Cloudflare Radar Bulletin. We're trying to try out this format related to Internet trends, insights, and outages we see on radar. So feedback from everyone is appreciated. We want to make it short, so I'm João Tomé, based in Lisbon, Portugal, and with me I have David Belson, our Head of Data Insights that is on the Boston area. Hello, David. Good afternoon, João. Good afternoon, morning, night, depends on where you're seeing this or at what time. Let's dig in already in terms of trends we've seen. Actually, there's two, I think, two main things that we've been monitoring for a while. Iran and the protests there, and also Ukraine. Especially, of course, there's the war in Ukraine. We wrote blog posts about that before, but especially after October the 10th, there were new airstrikes, especially focused on energy infrastructure that made disruptions in several cities and regions in all of Ukraine. So two main topics, I would say. Although this week we had the WhatsApp outage for about two hours on Tuesday. So that was really impactful. We don't have a good viewpoint there, but it happened, and it was really relevant for a lot of people worldwide. But let's start, and let me share my screen, to focus on the Ukraine situation that is unfolding. This is our Call for Radar Twitter account, and let's start actually with the most recent one update we did. In terms of Kursan, Kursan Oblast, which is one of the regions that's still occupied, at least partially, by the Russians, the outage that started actually on Saturday still is ongoing. It's a partial outage. So it's a clear impact in this case, and we are comparing here with the previous weeks. It looks like there was an outage there last week as well, it appears. There was, actually. With that green line on Monday. Exactly. Here you can see clearly that there was a clear outage also. Actually, there's been a few of them in terms of not complete outages. For example, Kiev Oblast, which is the region outside the city of Kiev, has a bunch of clear decreases in traffic, especially during the day. And because infrastructure in Ukraine was affected, energy infrastructure, there's also sometimes a clear power outage that affects the Internet. Sometimes they're limiting, self-imposed limiting on power usage. So people are using less electricity in some areas, especially. Right, right. Because they're trying to save energy. Right. What we're seeing here, I think, is less Internet infrastructure sort of outages related to the power outages, and more consumer traffic. Obviously, that's what we're graphing here is end-user traffic. But I think a lot of times when we see power outages, we also see Internet infrastructure being impacted as well as end-user connectivity. But I think here it's more of the latter. In these regions, there's also something at play, which is the government is creating in some areas, sometimes, some periods of the day. So these are prepared outages. They are doing that to save energy. It's scheduled. Yeah. They're doing that to save energy because I think they announced 30% of power stations were affected, deeply affected, in terms of… Lower generation capacity means less to consume, and that means the rationing and the rolling blackouts and whatnot. Exactly. And there's a bunch of regions in this case that were affected still today and even before. This is from the beginning of this period of problems in terms of Internet traffic we saw. It was on a Monday, October the 10th, that we saw a 35% decrease in traffic in Ukraine, which is a lot for a whole country in this case. Let's move on from Ukraine to Iran, where the protests were happening this week. Right. Again. And it's more than one month, right? It's been a little bit over a month. It's been 40 days, in fact, or I guess it was 41 days since the death of Massa Amini in police custody. Shortly after her death, there were a number of protests that started to occur around Tehran. In response to that, the Iranian government last month had shut down Internet connectivity in a couple of cities, or a couple of areas, including Sanandij and Tehran. And then a few days after that, they implemented what folks called Internet curfews for about two weeks. We covered that actually in the Q3 Internet Disruption Overview blog post we published last week. Exactly. I'm showing that right now. There were three major mobile providers, Arancel, Rytel, and MCCI. And what they were doing was shutting down the Internet on those networks for about eight hours each evening, from about 4 p.m. to midnight local time. That continued for about two weeks. Then they backed off of that, started implementing Internet shutdowns kind of on the weekends, for the first couple of weekends of October. And then since then, it's been a little bit more spotty. And yesterday's outage, yesterday's shutdown, was due to protests that were related to basically marking the 40th day since she died. Exactly. We have a little time. Let's also show some disruptions we saw this morning. Yep, in Australia. In Australia, exactly, in one specific ISP. Yeah, so largely, Aussie Broadband saw some issues. I just checked, and there's still no published root cause or reason for outage available. They have it kind of classified as an unscheduled outage. But it took down traffic in Victoria for about two and a half hours, and a little bit less than an hour, about a half hour in New South Wales. Also, this week, there was a nationwide Sudan lockdown. So in Sudan, the major network providers had shut down Internet access yesterday, which ultimately manifested itself in a countrywide disruption. That started a little bit before 8 a.m. UTC yesterday, but it was related to the first anniversary of a coup that had derailed the transition to civilian rule there. And this outage lasted about eight hours. And this is something unrelated to outages, it was just a few trends. We saw DNS trends, we saw related to the new prime minister, actually, in the UK, Rishi Sunak. So this is like a list of trends related to that, since Least Trust fired... Over the last few weeks. Exactly, over the last few weeks. She resigned October 20th. So this is news organizations' interest, in a sense. And clearly, the Least Trust resigning was the one that got more attention in terms of DNS queries, for sure. Before we go, just a mention on our Internet Disruptions blog post for the third quarter of 2022 that we wrote. And we have also a Cloudflare TV segment on that, so everyone can see. Keep an eye on the Cloudflare Radar Twitter handle for links to both the blog post and the Cloudflare TV segment we did on it. Of course. And of course, everyone can check radar.Cloudflare.com to see Internet trends. Absolutely. And I think that's a wrap. Thank you, David. Sounds good. Thank you. Bye-bye.