Sudan Hit By Internet Blackout Amidst Riots

Internet access in Sudan appears to be down, as riots in the capital Khartoum erupted earlier today.

Renesys, the Internet intelligence organisation, said the outage started at around 1:47pm. Arbor Networks said it saw the outage start at 2pm, whilst Akamai saw disruption earlier on, as shown in the data below:

Sudan outage

Earlier in the day, Renesys said 196 networks experienced an outage in Sudan starting at 10:23 UTC, representing nine percent of the routed networks in the country. But the global Internet was still accessible thanks to Sudatel Telecom.

It is unclear whether the Internet had been purposefully shut down, or if there were other reasons.

Sudanese police had fired tear gas at protesters, who were demonstrating against the lifting of fuel subsidies.

Protesters had set a university property on fire as well as a number of petrol stations.

Fuel subsidies have been scrapped as the government looks to deal with its budget deficit. The Republic of Sudan has had growing problems since its split with South Sudan in 2011. It lost three quarters of its oil reserves when the split was formalised.

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