A shutdown tracker counts eleven live disruptions on 20 August and does not say where

Internet Society Pulse’s shutdown tracker carries a snapshot explicitly dated 20 August 2026 recording eleven shutdowns ongoing worldwide. The same page gives a rolling twelve-month figure of 74 total or partial shutdowns across ten countries since August 2025, and 18,777 hours of access lost to intentional disruption. Pulse’s methodology requires a clear measurement plus evidence of intentionality, confirmed by trusted local or international sources, an Internet Society chapter or a #KeepItOn partner, or acknowledged by the party responsible. That is a published tracker figure, not eleven independently reported events, and the distinction matters: the country breakdown determines whether the live picture is a Sahel story, an Iran story or an India story. We have not opened it, so we are not guessing.

Two older datasets are circulating this month in a way that invites them to be read as new. The Internet Society published “Shutdown Trends from 2019 to 2025” on 6 August 2026: 916 events across 61 countries, of which 70.8% lasted a day or less and 95.4% ended within 30 days, with India alone accounting for close to one in every two events recorded. Access Now’s #KeepItOn report, launched 31 March 2026, counted at least 313 shutdowns in 52 countries during calendar 2025. The two use different definitions and are not additive. Access Now also wrote to Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema on 5 August urging restraint around the 13 August election. Whether anything was actually throttled that day is unresolved in this pull.

Assessment: The shutdown-measurement field has a structural problem that these numbers illustrate rather than solve: the counting is done by advocacy networks and a standards body, the events are denied by the states that cause them, and the aggregate figures travel far better than the country lists that give them meaning. A brief that prints “eleven ongoing” without naming them is producing a mood, not information. The honest version is that the tally is credible and the composition is unexamined. The unexamined part is also where the Sahel sits — Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan — and nothing here should be read as evidence those networks were up.