FINDING · EVALUATION

The merged KIO-IODA dataset (Jan 2018–Aug 2021) documents 219 national-scale Internet shutdowns across 35 countries and 714 spontaneous outages across 150 countries; the 35 shutdown-affected countries collectively represent more than 1 billion estimated Internet users. Myanmar (53 IODA events), Syria (52), and Iraq (38) are the most frequently affected countries in the shutdown dataset.

From 2023-bischof-destination — Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and Shutdowns · §4, Table 2 · 2023 · SIGCOMM

Implications

Circumvention deployment should explicitly target the ~35 countries responsible for all documented national shutdowns; concentration in Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, and Iran warrants dedicated in-country infrastructure and localized user-support pipelines.
Scale planning for circumvention tools must account for simultaneous demand spikes across multiple countries, given that the affected population exceeds 1 billion users and political crises often cluster regionally.