Posts by Doug Madory

On January 20, 2021, a great mystery appeared in the internet’s global routing table. An entity that hadn’t been heard from in over a decade began announcing large swaths of formerly unused IPv4 address space belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense. Registered as GRS-DoD, AS8003 began announcing 11.0.0.0/8 among other large DoD IPv4 ranges.

In the past 24hrs, Myanmar experienced a military coup d’état during which prominent government figures like Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi were detained and internet service was almost entirely blacked out.

Here is what the shutdown looked like in our data (with annotations for timing) for Myanmar’s big four: Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), Telenor Myanmar, Ooredoo Myanmar, and Mytel.

Last week I had the honor to participate in the PTC 2021 conference. Held in Hawaii every January, PTC’s annual conference is the Pacific Rim’s premier telecommunications event. Although this year’s conference was all virtual (no boondoggles to Honolulu!), it was no less important as the theme this year was New Realities. In the following blog post, I summarize what I presented in my PTC panel entitled Strategies to Meet Network Needs.

The shutdown in Egypt not only shifted the dynamics of protest in the 21st century, it was a watershed moment for the internet community — from technical organizations like Renesys to digital rights advocacy groups like Access Now. The era of the large-scale government-directed internet shutdown had truly begun.