Belarus internet shutdown forces reliance on Telegram and VPNs
In August 2020, controversial Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko cut off most of the nation's access to the internet in hopes of disrupting the protests against the vote-rigging that saw him installed as president. Online news sites were left largely offline from election day onward, and demonstrators had to scramble to find wifi connections and working VPNs or proxies in order to share whatever news they could find. Protests therefore relied on popular bloggers on Telegram channels to suggest meeting points and share news and videos. Lukashenko blamed the outages on distributed denial-of-service attacks from abroad.
Writer: Yan Auseyushkin and Andrew Roth
Publication: The Guardian
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