The Day the Network Died: Afghanistan’s Brief Digital Blackout and What It Felt Like
On a gray morning in Kabul, the city woke up in silence—not the silence of dawn, but the odd, modern silence of a world suddenly unplugged. Phones that usually buzz with messages, money transfers and classroom links lay inert. Cafés that streamed cricket highlights and lecture recordings to students were empty of sound. Two days later, the lights came back on. For about 48 hours, Afghanistan’s mobile and internet services vanished, and for a country already living on the edge of humanitarian and political fault lines, the outage felt like a small collapse.
“My cousin was teaching an online class for teenage girls,” said Roya, a mother in west Kabul, her voice raw with fatigue. “The lesson froze. We couldn’t reach her. We don’t know if the students thought she abandoned them.”
A sudden blackout, a slow-burning crisis
Late on the afternoon of the second day, users in Kabul and other cities reported that the networks of two major providers—Roshan and Etisalat—were back. Internet service companies also signaled restoration. But the interruption, which began on Monday, had already rippled through the fragile arteries of daily life.
A Taliban information department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told local reporters that technical faults had caused the outage and that services would be “quickly restored.” The ruling movement did not offer a public explanation, and international agencies urged swift action to restore connectivity. A United Nations spokesperson said, “Access to information and communication is a lifeline—especially now. The UN calls for immediate restoration to prevent further humanitarian harm.”
What stopped when the network did
The list of immediate victims was long and quietly devastating.
- Education: Girls and women, barred from secondary school and university campuses since 2021, rely heavily on online learning and informal networks to continue their education. Outages cut off classes, homework help, and a fragile promise of continuity.
- Finance: Remittances, electronic payments and mobile banking—vital for households across Afghanistan—were disrupted. Small businesses could not transact, and border trade partners faced delays.
- Transport and logistics: Flights were cancelled or delayed; travelers were stranded. Banks’ operations were hampered, and the flow of commerce stuttered.
“For many families, the phone is the bank,” said Dr. Samir Halimi, a Kabul-based economist. “When the network stops, liquidity dries up. People can’t receive money from relatives abroad, and small traders can’t pay suppliers. The economic shocks are immediate.”
Human stories behind the headlines
Walk through Kabul’s old bazaar and you’ll hear stories that statistics can’t capture. At a tea stall near the chicken market, men in pakol hats argued about the outage and shared gossip. A fruit seller, his cart piled with pomegranates, said the blackout cost him two days of orders to buyers in neighboring provinces.
“We sell on credit sometimes,” he told me, tapping his phone like a talisman that suddenly refused to work. “If they can’t call, we can’t agree on credit. We lose customers. It’s simple.”
For a generation of Afghan women and girls barred from classrooms, the internet has become a fragile classroom of its own. “An entire ecosystem has grown up online—tutors using WhatsApp groups, grammar lessons shared through voice notes, girls studying for entrance exams on borrowed devices,” said Laila, a volunteer who organizes remote learning circles in Herat. “When you cut that off, you cut hope.”
Why connectivity matters more than you might think
Afghanistan’s internet penetration has long lagged behind global averages. Estimates in recent years placed the share of people with regular internet access at roughly one in five to one in four Afghans, concentrated in urban centers. Mobile subscriptions number in the tens of millions, covering a substantial—though uneven—portion of the population.
That patchwork connectivity is often the only conduit to the outside world: humanitarian updates, job postings, encrypted chats that allow women to study anonymously, and mobile cash that keeps families fed. When the network falters, the fragile coping mechanisms Afghans have built are exposed.
“People think of internet shutdowns as abstract policy tools,” said Maya Singh, a digital rights researcher who has followed Afghanistan for years. “But in practice, these are economic shutdowns, educational shutdowns, rights shutdowns. They hit the most vulnerable first.”
Patterns and precedents
This outage was not an isolated event. Earlier this year, parts of northern Afghanistan experienced an internet ban, and last year the Taliban authorities banned chess in some provinces on the grounds that it could lead to gambling. Each measure chips away at the contours of public life and raises questions about governance, control and the future of civic space in Afghanistan.
International bodies have repeatedly warned that restrictions on communications can worsen humanitarian crises. In contexts where food insecurity and economic collapse are already present, cutting digital lifelines can magnify suffering. The UN’s call to reinstate services was one of several urgent pleas echoed by aid organizations and human rights groups.
The broader picture
Think beyond Afghanistan for a moment: we live in an era where authoritarians and fragile states alike use digital controls as levers of power. From the coordinated internet blackouts during elections in some countries to targeted throttling of social apps in others, access to the web is increasingly a question of political will, not infrastructure.
But global trends don’t mean the same thing everywhere. In Afghanistan, where decades of conflict have hollowed institutions and normalized abrupt policy shifts, the stakes feel intimate to every household.
After the lights came back on
When networks returned, relief was immediate but cautious. Messages flooded in—a mix of mundane updates and urgent pleas. “Thank God, my niece’s class resumed,” Roya told me, her voice lighter. But the return did not erase the damage of the past two days, nor did it answer the deeper question: what happens the next time?
“We can restore a network,” Dr. Halimi said, “but restoring trust is harder. People ask whether their lines of communication can be cut again at any time. Businesses hesitate to invest. Mothers worry about their daughters’ futures.”
Questions that linger
As the city hums back to its usual tempo, ask yourself: how do we balance sovereignty and security with the basic human need to connect? When governments—of whatever stripe—control the wires and the waves, who protects the right to learn, trade, and live with dignity?
For Afghans, the answer is not academic. It is daily, practical, urgent. The brief blackout was a reminder that in a world woven together by cables and data centers, freedom can still be cut with the flick of a switch. And until there are firmer guarantees—legal, technical, and political—every outage will be a small catastrophe for someone somewhere in the country.
“We live between two worlds,” Laila said, looking out over a city that has always known conflict and surprise. “One where the internet opens windows, and one where it can be closed again. I hope for more windows.”
