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Based on incidents such as those reported in https://www.ft.com/content/24b8b7b2-9272-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271, there is interest in spotting the occurrence and impact of large Internet outages such as may be occasioned by civil unrest etc. (see the article "From Content Blocking to National Shutdowns: Understanding Internet Disruptions" from the Internet Society for the various causes of outages. For a list of outages examined by PingER see PingER Case Studies.

Automating detection

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 probably 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.

The article (https://www.ft.com/content/24b8b7b2-9272-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271) talks about mobile networks which we are not monitoring. It also refers to turning off social media which probably would not affect PingER. Also, there is no kill switch for a country, there are typically multiple carriers who will probably shut down at different times.  
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. 

Some Examples
Looking at the daily results for the last 365 days (on 6/20/2019), of the countries mentioned, in the article:

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According to https://twitter.com/InternetIntel there was a significant Internet disruption starting 15:30 UTC June 25th following controversy surrounding presidential elections hover over the past weekend. Below is the daily packet loss of three hosts in Mauritania measured by pinging them from SLAC. 

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