Guinea blocked WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube

On 24th November 2023, OONI data suggests that some ISPs in Guinea started blocking access to WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Recent OONI data suggests that the blocks ended by 23rd February 2024.

The following charts aggregate OONI measurement coverage from the testing of WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube in Guinea between 1st November 2023 to 23rd February 2024.

As is evident from the above charts, the tested social media services (WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) were previously found accessible in Guinea (annotated in green as “OK”), only starting to present a spike in anomalies (annotated in orange) between 24th November 2023 to 22nd February 2024. The correlated timing of the anomalies, coupled with the persistent presence of anomalies thereafter, provides a strong signal of blocking.

By looking at the anomalous measurements, we can see that the blocks are primarily implemented by means of TLS interference because we observe the timing out of the session after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake. We also observe a few cases of DNS-based tampering, as some OONI measurements show that an NXDOMAIN error (which means that a domain is non-existent) is returned as part of DNS resolution. The blocking of YouTube is further corroborated by Google traffic data, which shows a significant (and ongoing) drop in YouTube traffic from Guinea, starting from 24th November 2023.

If you are in Guinea, you can contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.