Based on incidents such as those reported in https://www.ft.com/content/24b8b7b2-9272-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271, there is interest in spotting the occurance of, occurrence and the impact of large Internet outages such as may be occasioned by civil unrest. To spot the shutdown of a country automatically would take a bit of mining. For example, the country should have 2 or more target hosts and if all the targets in a country go offline (not reachable) in the same time frame then that is an indicator that something is probbaly happening and worth investigating. Of course, that assumes the Measurement Agent (SLAC) also was not down (due to maintenance etc.) at the same time. One can tell from say https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/sites-per-country.html how many targets there are by country.
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Some of the outages are all day(s) which would make it easier to detect. Shorter outages would be trickier. On the other hand, if we know of outages then we can look at the data around that time to see the impact.
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- We do not have a target in Chad.
- Looking at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl?file=average_rtt&by=by-node&size=100&tick=last365days&from=EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.PINGER&to=Africa&ex=none&only=all&ipv=all&dataset=hep&percentage=any Benin Benin in the last 365 days had both its targets unreachable Aug 6-7, 2019, however that does not match what was reported (see https://www.voanews.com/africa/benin-internet-shutdown-repeats-pattern-government-censorship-across-africa, which was posted April 30th also see https://netblocks.org/reports/internet-blocked-in-benin-on-election-day-aAwqkny) which indicates the outage was April 28th starting at 11:00am UTC). Note the Benin outage lasted 15 hours so it was not down for a whole day, thus we would miss it using the daily data. It would be necessary to mine the hourly data. Looking at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl?file=average_rtt&by=by-node&size=100&tick=hourly&year=2019&month=04&day=28&from=EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.PINGER&to=Africa&ex=none&only=all&ipv=all&dataset=hep&percentage=any however, I do not see either host in Benin being unreachable (100% loss) on April 28, 2019. Maybe there is a proxy elsewhere which was not affected, although the RTTs look reasonable.
Looking at the raw data, we get no response starting between 11:30am and noon and ending between 23:00 and 23:30 UTC April 28th UTC for www.uac.bj(lat=6.4410 , long=2.3527 at Universite dAbomey-Calavi, Abomey Calavi, Benin) and also for www.officedubacbenin.bj(lat=6.35, long=2.433 at Office Du Bac, Benin, Cotenu, Benin) - Looking at the analyzed data, the DRC (CD) does not appear to have any all day outages for either of the two sites monitored in Kinshasa (www.afrinet.cd and www.gbs.cd). There is a report of outages in the capital of Kinshasa (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46721168) the Internet in Kinshasa was shut down in the morning (the report is Dec 31st 2018). I looked at the hourly data for the 2 Kinshasa node and do not see any outages for Dec 30, 31 and Jan 1st.
Looking at the raw data www.afrinet.cd does have an outage (see https://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/ping_data_plot.pl?monitor=pinger.slac.stanford.edu&sites=www.afrinet.cd&begin_day=26&begin_month=12&begin_year=2018&end_day=31&end_month=12&end_year=2018&plot=time&data=100&full=false&bin_width=1&data=100&debug=1). There was no response after 10:47am 12/31/2019, and the next recorded response was 18:17 12/31/2019 (UTC). The other node www.gbs.cd does not see any loss of connectivity. - Looking at https://www.npr.org/2019/06/16/733158506/sudans-internet-outage?ft=nprml&f=1004 they report on June 16th, 2019 that the entire Sudanese network has been down for the last 13 days. There are two PingER targets in Sudan but only one (www.sustech.edu) has worked for a long time (I will try and find another target and replace the nonworker) and the working one has not seen an all day outage in the last 365 days.
Looking at the raw data (see https://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/ping_data_plot.pl?monitor=pinger.slac.stanford.edu&sites=www.sustech.edu&begin_day=01&begin_month=06&begin_year=2019&end_day=21&end_month=06&end_year=2019&plot=time&data=100&full=false&bin_width=1&debug=1) there is no noticeable loss of connectivity (loss=100%) between June 1st and June 21,2019 UTC.