Democratic Republic of Congo blocked Twitter/X and TikTok

In early February 2025, access to Twitter/X and TikTok was reportedly blocked in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) amid escalating conflict and civil unrest.

OONI data collected from the DRC during this period suggests that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) blocked access to Twitter/X and TikTok during the first two weeks of February 2025, with measurements providing the strongest signals of blocking between 3rd February 2025 to 11th February 2025.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of domains used for the functionality of Twitter/X services (including twitter.com and x.com) in the DRC between 25th January 2025 to 19th February 2025.

While the overall number of OONI measurements collected from the DRC in this period is limited, it is evident that most measurements from the testing of Twitter/X domains presented anomalies between 3rd February 2025 to 11th February 2025, indicating that access to Twitter/X was blocked.

Moreover, we see that most anomalous measurements have been collected from three tested networks: GVA Cote d'Ivoire SAS (AS36924), CELTEL (AS37020), Orange (AS37447) as demonstrated in the chart below.

Many anomalous measurements collected from the testing of Twitter/X endopoints on the GVA Cote d'Ivoire SAS (AS36924) and Orange (AS37447) networks indicate that the block was IP-based. While all three ISPs returned the right IP address related to the Twitter/X services (104.244.42.65), most measurements failed to connect to this IP and resulted in timeout errors. At the same time, we see that CELTEL (AS37020) blocked access to twitter.com by means of TLS interference, as most measurements collected from this network result in timeout errors after the first write operation.

Very few OONI measurements were collected from the testing of TikTok in the DRC throughout February 2025, but the few available measurements present anomalies (i.e. signs of TikTok blocking) between 1st to 10th February 2025 – correlating with the timing of the Twitter/X block, discussed previously. The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of TikTok (www.tiktok.com) in the DRC between 27th January 2025 to 27th February 2025.

Most of the anomalous measurements suggest that access to TikTok was blocked by means of TLS interference because we see that the connection is reset after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake.

If you are in the DRC, you can test social media and contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.