- Protests against the controversial Finance Bill 2024 turned violent on Tuesday, with reports of Internet throttling and disruptions adding to the already tense situation in Kenya.
- NetBlocks, a global Internet monitoring organisation, reported that Internet disruptions affected Kenya and neighbouring countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. These disruptions are likely limiting the coverage of the protests and obscuring the full extent of the unrest.
- However, many users experienced slow and unreliable Internet service. Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco, attributed the issues to an outage in two undersea cables and warned customers of ongoing slow and intermittent service.
Per reports, at least five people were killed and many others, including journalists and paramedics, were injured. This move comes after the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) disclosed that it had no plans to shut down the Internet or disrupt the quality of connectivity as a protest against the Finance Bill 2024 persists.
The #RejectFinanceBill has been a hot topic online showing the stance of citizens on the bill. The bill, proposed by the Kenyan government for the 2024/25 tax year, aims to raise $2.7 billion in additional taxes to reduce the budget deficit and state borrowing, sparking nationwide protests.
At approximately 4:00 pm on Tuesday, June 25, the Internet connectivity dropped by nearly 40% across over 20 networks nationwide. The outage, which has sparked concerns among people, suggests that these disruptions are intentional and that the government hopes to “limit the coverage of the events at the protest grounds and to stunt the spread of it over the media”
President William Ruto said that the events are seen as “grave threats to national security.” He said that “the government has mobilized all resources to ensure that this situation would not recur” Adding that the government will take action “ at whatever cost.”
The United Nations considers the disruption of Internet access and communication to be a violation of international human rights law. Additionally, the Kenyan Constitution upholds the right to peaceful protest and expression.
Meanwhile, Kenyan businesses and institutions are on high alert as the global hacktivist group Anonymous has issued warnings to the country's government, demanding that citizens be allowed to protest freely against the #RejectFinanceBill2024 movement.
The threat serves as a stark reminder of the significant Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Kenyan government websites in July 2023. These attacks, attributed to Anonymous Sudan, were carried out under the pretext of defending citizens' rights.