Ethiopia has shut off internet access to its citizens, according to reports from within the country, apparently due to leaked exam papers for the nation’s grade 10 examinations.
Outbound traffic from Ethiopia was shut down around 4 pm UK time on Tuesday, according to Google’s transparency report, which registered Ethiopian visits to the company’s sites plummeting over the evening. By Wednesday afternoon, access still had not been restored.
Last year, activists leaked the papers for the country’s 12th-grade national exams, calling for the postponement of the papers due to a school shutdown in the regional state of Oromia. Now, the government appears to have taken the move to shut down internet access as a preventative measure.
“Mobile data has been deactivated,” deputy communications minister Zadig Abrha told AFP, declining to elaborate further.
A spokesman for the state-owned Ethio Telecom did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Home to both the headquarters of the African Union and the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa has gained the nickname “Africa’s political capital”.
But officials at both institutions said their internet was cut on Tuesday afternoon but returned Wednesday, while average Ethiopians were still unable to connect via their phones or modems, which use mobile SIM cards.
Ethiopia has been censoring its Internet for more than a decade.
