Prolonged conflicts with gradual infrastructure recovery represent a third category of detection gap: IODA-style automated systems struggle to distinguish ongoing partial outages from normal network fluctuation, causing recovery-phase disruptions in conflict zones (e.g., Myanmar, Sudan) to go undocumented in automated records.
From 2026-cheek-gaps-record-observability — Gaps in the Record: On the Observability and Documentation of Internet Shutdowns
· §3 Detection Gap Categories
· 2026
· FOCI 2026
Implications
In conflict-zone deployments, design circumvention infrastructure to tolerate persistent partial degradation rather than treating it as a transient event — 'mostly up' may be the long-term steady state, not a signal of imminent full recovery.
Time-boxed fallback timeouts calibrated to normal outage durations will misfire in prolonged-conflict scenarios; implement adaptive timeout strategies based on geopolitical context signals.