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Showing posts from October, 2021

Facebook Disappears from the Internet; Globally, People Assume Censorship

Figure 1: People around the world naturally turned to Psiphon in response to the Facebook outage.  Summary: Psiphon’s global usage surged by 1.75 Million daily unique users during the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021. The rise was particularly acute in regions where Facebook platforms - including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself - experience regular disruptions due to intermittent, but active censorship. The regions that saw the most significant increases in usage include several countries where major censorship events have occurred within the past few years: Azerbaijan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Sudan, and Syria. Cuba showed a 4.6x increase from baseline usage, from 70,000 to over 300,000 daily unique users, reinforcing Psiphon’s important role in the region. In July 2021, the Psiphon network supported a surge of 1.4M users from Cuba during targeted blocking of social media and messaging platforms, a still-immanent threat from censors. This demonstr