14 DAY TRIAL // Turkey has once again banned several online services, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and YouTube, as part of a media suppression effort that’s believed to be related to the detention of several leaders of opposition political party HDP.
Although specifics are not available at the moment, TurkeyBlocks is reporting that all these services went down on Friday, November 04, 2016 at 1:20AM local time, as they were blocked by the country’s largest ISPs.
“TurkeyBlocks monitoring probes have identified throttling at the ISP level as the source of slowdowns, with the majority of internet users affected at the time of measurement. The shutdown was first detected on national provider TTNet, Turkcell and subsequently on other major ISPs, with users of UyduNet and other smaller providers not yet affected at the time of writing,” the service states.
Users in Turkey have already confirmed huge slowdowns when accessing the aforementioned services, and without a VPN, connecting to social media no longer seems to be possible.
Turkey bans
This isn’t the first time Turkey blocks online services this year, as the country turned to similar measures last month when it restricted access to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and GitHub.
In this case, however, authorities were trying to prevent data stolen from hacked email accounts belonging to the Turkey government from spreading online, and access to these services was restored only after the parent companies agreed to remove the data in question from their servers.
At the moment, it’s not yet clear how long this outage is going to last, as information on this is missing entirely, but we’ll be keeping an eye out on reports to see when they become available once again and update this article.
UPDATE: It appears that Instagram has been blocked too, so other services might be added to the list of banned services in the coming hours. For the moment, we have Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp that are all banned in Turkey.