Iraq has been shutting down the internet periodically to prevent students from cheating on exams, according to data from DYN Research, a firm that tracks web outages across the world. The company's data shows that internet access was nearly entirely blocked for three hours on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning this week, between 5AM and 8AM local time. That pattern mirrors shutdowns that the Iraqi government ordered last year, which coincided with final exams for sixth grade students.
"There was certainly a lot of skepticism about this explanation last summer, but the outages did coincide with exams and nothing emerged to dispute the explanation," Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at DYN, tells Vocativ.
via The Verge
