This year marks ten years since Access Now launched #KeepItOn, a global campaign built around a simple but urgent demand: governments should stop cutting off internet access to their own citizens. A decade in, the campaign's lead recently spoke about what the coalition has accomplished so far and where the fight against internet shutdowns goes from here. For anyone who cares about privacy and free expression online, the anniversary is worth pausing on, because internet shutdowns remain one of the bluntest tools governments use to control information and, increasingly, to hide what happens next.
A Decade of #KeepItOn
When #KeepItOn began, internet shutdowns were often treated as isolated incidents tied to elections or protests in specific countries. Ten years later, Access Now's coalition has helped reframe shutdowns as a recognized global human rights issue, one tracked, documented, and challenged through legal advocacy, research, and public pressure campaigns. Part of that work includes storytelling projects like "Sound of the Silenced," which centers the voices of people whose lives and rights are directly affected when connectivity disappears, whether that means missing emergency information, losing contact with family, or being unable to report on unfolding events.
What started as a coalition effort has grown into one of the most cited sources on shutdown tracking worldwide. That visibility matters because internet shutdowns are rarely announced in advance or explained afterward. Without independent monitoring, it can be difficult for the public, journalists, or human rights groups to even confirm that a shutdown happened, let alone understand who ordered it and why.
Why Internet Shutdowns Are a Privacy Issue
It's tempting to file internet shutdowns under "censorship" and leave it there, but the privacy implications run deeper. Shutdowns frequently coincide with periods of heightened surveillance, protests, elections, conflicts, or civil unrest, precisely the moments when people most need secure ways to communicate. When connectivity is cut entirely, encrypted messaging apps, VPNs, and other privacy tools become useless, leaving people with fewer safe options to organize, document abuses, or simply stay in touch with loved ones.
Shutdowns also create an information vacuum that can mask other privacy violations. Data collection, device seizures, and network-level monitoring are harder to detect and report when the very tools people would use to raise alarms, social media, messaging apps, VPN connections, are offline. In that sense, a shutdown isn't just about denying access. It's about denying the ability to prove what happened while access was denied.
The Scale of the Problem Today
Access Now's own research underscores how widespread this practice has become. According to the organization's reporting on internet shutdowns, at least 313 shutdowns were implemented across 52 countries in a single year, a scale that reflects rising repression met by an equally determined global resistance. That number represents governments choosing, over and over, to sever connectivity as a first response to unrest rather than a last resort.
The pattern isn't limited to authoritarian states with obvious track records of censorship. Shutdowns have occurred around elections, protests, school exam periods, and security operations in a wide range of countries, suggesting that cutting off the internet has become a normalized policy option rather than an emergency measure. That normalization is exactly what campaigns like #KeepItOn are trying to reverse, by making shutdowns costly, visible, and legally challengeable rather than routine.
Disruption to digital access doesn't only come from government decree, either. Ransomware and other attacks on critical infrastructure show how fragile connectivity and access to services can be even outside a political context. When Stadler Rail refused a multimillion-dollar ransomware demand rather than pay, it was a reminder that keeping systems and networks running, whether against government intervention or criminal extortion, requires deliberate resistance rather than passive hope.
What This Means For You
Most readers of this site will never experience a government-ordered internet shutdown directly, but the broader lesson applies everywhere: access to the internet is not guaranteed, and the tools we rely on for privacy only work when connectivity itself is available. If you live, work, or have family in regions where shutdowns are common, it's worth understanding in advance what backup communication methods exist, whether that's offline messaging apps, satellite options, or simply knowing which local organizations track and report shutdowns as they happen.
For everyone else, the anniversary is a reminder to pay attention to how governments justify restricting connectivity, since the same rationale, security, public order, misinformation control, can be applied more broadly over time. Supporting organizations that monitor and document shutdowns helps ensure these events don't go unnoticed simply because the people affected have no way to speak up while it's happening.
Takeaways
Ten years of #KeepItOn haven't ended internet shutdowns, but they have made them harder to hide and easier to challenge. As governments continue to reach for connectivity cuts during moments of unrest, understanding the privacy and human rights stakes behind those decisions is the first step toward holding them accountable. Staying informed, supporting independent monitoring efforts, and recognizing shutdowns as a privacy issue, not just a censorship issue, are practical ways to engage with a fight that's far from over.
