According to Access Now’s Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), the number of recorded Internet shutdowns has spiked from 75 in 2016 to 188 in 2018, with the majority of these affecting users in Asia and Africa.

Recently, Zimbabwean authorities shut down the internet after price hikes on fuel costs brought people to the streets — leading to a crackdown on protesters and the first observed complete internet shutdown in the nation’s history. Disruption to Internet services in the country ended on January 21st after Zimbabwe’s High Court ruled the shutdowns illegal; however, Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services deputy minister Energy Mutodi recently stated that the government would not hesitate to implement these measures again.

After seeing VPN searches shoot up by 1500%, we spoke with our partners in Zimbabwe to learn more about how VPNs are being talked about and shared, and what role memes can play in popularizing their everyday use.

a Total Internet Shutdown: ‘We never saw it coming’

This is not the first time that Zimbabwe has experienced intentional disruptions to their Internet service. In 2016, while Robert Mugabe was still in power, protesters took to the streets en masse to voice their discontent over the country’s economic situation and were met with the shutdown of social media sites like WhatsApp. Because of this previous experience, many people expected a partial shutdown but were unprepared for the more drastic measures taken by the current government. According to Sean Ndlovu, co-founder of the Center for Innovation & Technology and one of Localization Lab’s contributors, when the government implemented a total Internet shutdown, he was caught off guard:

“When the call for shutdowns started, some of us in the digital security sector started telling people to prepare. But in our minds we were thinking it would be something like social media, not the total shutdown of the Internet. The population didn’t really expect that the Internet would shutdown, because I remember people were encouraging others to download Psiphon and other VPNs, and everyone said ‘No, nothing is going to happen. The president won’t mess up his reputation for this’ You know, the regular rhetoric that everything would go according to plan, but, alas, they did turn off the Internet.”

For Arthur Gwagwa, a Senior Research Fellow at Strathmore University, the sentiment of surprise was the same:

“The president has been giving a face to the international community, making them think that he wouldn’t do something like this -- so we never saw it coming. Even during the 2016 protests the internet wasn’t totally shut down like this.”

An Internet shutdown is defined as “an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.” This can mean, Internet throttling (or intentionally slowing down Internet bandwidth so as to make it basically unusable), partial Internet shutdowns (like the blocking of specific social media sites), and total Internet shutdowns (also known as blackouts or kill switches). According to a report by OONI Probe, in the case of Zimbabwe, the government implemented all of these tactics -- starting with throttling, then moving on to blocking social media sites like Twitter and WhatsApp, until they finally shut the internet down completely.