2021-padmanabhan-multi-perspective
findings extracted from this paper
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Cellular data restrictions imposed from Mar. 15, 2021 were invisible to IODA (which uses BGP routing data, active probing, and darknet traffic) because cellular networks commonly use Carrier Grade NAT. Kentik's AS-level NetFlow aggregates clearly showed the cellular traffic drop, with all four major cellular ASes (MPT AS9988, Mytel AS136255, Telenor AS133385, Ooredoo AS132167) experiencing sustained traffic reductions while fixed-line providers only showed nightly dips.
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Beginning Feb. 14, 2021, country-wide Internet outages affected Myanmar for 72 consecutive nights until Apr. 28, starting at 18:30 UTC (01:00 local time) and lasting 8 hours each night. These nightly curfews were highly synchronized across most ISPs—identical start and end times—in stark contrast to the haphazard, mis-timed outages on the day of the coup.
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IP blocking in Myanmar was non-deterministic within individual ASes: Frontiir (AS58952) blocked Facebook's IP 157.240.15.36 but not 31.13.82.36, indicating ISPs used incomplete address lists. Different websites were blocked on different networks, and DNS interference was inconsistent even within a single ISP's resolvers, confirming that censorship was decentralized rather than implemented via a national choke point.
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Post-coup, Myanmar ISPs shifted from primarily DNS-based blocking (dominant in 2020) to IP-based blocking. Blocking Fastly's IP 151.101.1.195 triggered collateral unavailability of more than 10,000 co-hosted websites; blocking a Google-hosted IP (172.217.194.121) rendered snapchat.com, getoutline.org, and others unreachable on at least 4 ASes during Feb. 24–27, 2021.
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On Feb. 5, 2021, Campana Mythic (AS136168) announced Twitter's 104.244.42.0/24 prefix—apparently intending to blackhole Twitter traffic locally as part of the national Twitter block—but the route leaked to operators in Singapore and Vietnam, causing collateral disruption for Twitter users outside Myanmar. This accidental BGP leak corroborates evidence that Myanmar ISPs were independently implementing IP-level censorship without a centralized national kill switch.