🆕 Never Post! When The Taliban Turned the Internet Off in Afghanistan

Contributing producer and Kabul-based journalist Ali Latifi tells the story of a roughly 48-hour period, at the end of 2025, when the Taliban turned off the entire internet in Afghanistan.–

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• https://bsky.app/profile/netblocks.org/post/3mgrehog7wk23
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
• Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project
• The Internet, Switched Off  
• Internet Shutdown: How Governments Weaponize Connectivity
• Iran’s regime has shut down the internet in the middle of war
• How Iran shut down the internet and built a sophisticated system of digital control
• Afghanistan imposes internet blackout: What has the effect been so far?
• The Kremlin says the internet is turned off to stop drone attacks. Russians are fed up
• Blocked and Bypassed: Russians Evade Internet Censorship 

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Thank you to Suha, Fara, Saeed, Samir, Ramin, Mohammad, Hamed, Jabar, Sanam Muradi, Haroun Rahimi, Naser, Ahmad Azizi and Saeed.

This episode’s Contributing Producer is Ali Latifi. Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

1. These are the vague demands you make on me

2. (that I) assemble
(to) recollect
(to) decode
(   ) associate

3. that I admit, fraught with difficulty, reintegration
is no day at the beach in eggshell tints
“The inmates start to get brave and a little crazy”
when they hear that friendly voice–the matron

4. (But that’s also my mind, lost)
Her epic poem on the constraints society places on the

5. misunderstood

Excerpt of Sybil by Rebecca Wolf 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta and we have a dedicated show for you this week. Contributing producer and freelance journalist based in Kabul, Ali Latifi tells the story of a roughly forty eight hour period at the 2025 when the Taliban turned off the entirety of the Internet in Afghanistan. His friends and neighbors reflect on the surprising and not so surprising impacts of being completely offline. And Ali reflects on how being so completely disconnected shifted his perspective of being online.

First, we're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed and then Ali Latifi on the time the Internet got turned off in Afghanistan. At the time of writing, Iran's internet has been off for about two hundred and seventy five hours, almost twelve days according to internet access watchdog group, NetBlocks, and coinciding with The United States and Israel's start of their coordinated bombing of the country. This comes not long after an extended outage in Iran which ended, albeit slowly and incompletely, in January. From the eighth to the twenty eighth, officials restricted access to the larger global network in response to demonstrations during which their revolutionary guard killed thousands and potentially over 30,000 protesters who took to the streets because of inflation, soaring food prices, and anti government sentiment. It was the largest demonstration in the country in nearly fifty years and it spread to multiple cities.

You maybe didn't hear much about it. An internet shutdown is one major reason why and the reason governments do it. This is an increasingly popular tactic amongst authoritarian governments and even some democratic ones. Digital rights group Access Now who tracks amongst other things internet shutdowns by government, estimates there were 78 internet shutdowns in 2017 and two hundred and 96 in 2024. They put India at the top of the list with 649 shutdowns over an eight year period, followed by Myanmar, Iran, Pakistan, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and so on and so on down the authoritarian roster.

You may wonder hearing that list, why aren't China or Russia near the top? Well, Internet shutdowns are a brute force approach. When a country hasn't consolidated and nationalized its communications infrastructure and they wanna keep information from getting in or out, they don't have many options. China and Russia have more control over their networks. They can more easily stop certain data streams from entering and in many scenarios leaving.

Though of course information as Stuart Brand proclaimed wants to be free and it often ends up being a national infrastructural game of cat and mouse. In 2025 for instance, Russia engaged in broad scale shutdowns and restrictions especially for mobile devices to thwart, they said, Ukrainian drone attacks. But the blocks were widely circumvented with VPN use. It's probably also worth pointing out here that China and Russia and Israel and Sudan and a few others may not turn the Internet off within their own borders, but often enact shutdowns on their neighbors, Myanmar, Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Laos, Bahrain, and so on. All this to say, China and Russia don't need to shut off the Internet.

They have their own. This is the direction Iran is headed as well. They've consolidated control of their communications infrastructure and they're able to keep citizens on their national intranet while blocking access to the global internet. This means national services like banks, government websites, and national media channels useful for disseminating propaganda remain operational. Access to global social media to report on what's happening is blocked unless of course you're a high up government official.

And of course with a single national Internet, everyone is just that much easier to surveil. Last fall, the Taliban, the ruling government in Afghanistan, blocked the Internet nationwide for about forty eight hours. They said this was to prevent immoral activity, a measure taken to prevent vice, one official said. Though there was speculation the reasoning was much broader and like the blocks in Iran were meant to keep citizens from communicating with the outside world, especially following a massive earthquake in the East. The Taliban has not consolidated control of their communications infrastructure.

They have no half measures to employ, no filtering to use. They literally just cut the cables and with very little warning. What happened next is a revealing portrait of the ways the Internet, the global Internet dominates everyday life even in places we may think of as remote. We discuss on this show the travails of social media, the immorality of tech barons, but it is in stories like this that we see how the Internet is a much larger thing, a literal lifeline to many while also being still an extractive entity, a machine of exploitation, a distraction from other parts of our lives. After we take a short break, contributing producer Ali Latifi was there in Afghanistan when the internet was shut off.

He asked his neighbors, friends, and acquaintances what that two days was like.

Not confirmed, but just received this. In accordance with the decree of the supreme leader, Internet services will be discontinued starting from 5PM today in Kabul.

It's around 02:30PM on 09/29/2025 when I receive this message on WhatsApp.

The network will be permanently disconnected until further notice, resulting in a twenty four hour outage each day. Additionally, certain other networks will experience daily Internet suspensions from 5PM to 8AM.

I immediately forward it to a friend who was close with the government asking, true? His response is simple. Yes. In case he's right, I send it to a human rights researcher in Europe. Because the message mentioned the mobile network I've had since 2011, I immediately rush to the office of another carrier near my home and sign up for a new eSIM.

An hour later, I'm back home with nothing to do but wait and see. A few years ago, I would have panicked. But by 2025, I'm accustomed to uncertain political and security claims in Afghanistan. There's no option in these situations but to sit and wait and see. 05:00, it's happening.

Damn. Disconnected.

In ten minutes, all my devices disconnect. It's all down. No signal on either SIM, no WiFi, no calls, and no texts. Texts. Tens of millions of Avrons are suddenly and swiftly cut off from each other and the outside world.

Hoping the text is true and the Internet will be back by the morning, I decide to just wait it out and watch or rewatch what movies were downloaded to my computer. But first, a drink of water. I bent to grab a bottle and hit my head against the metal hook. I never noticed it protruding out of the refrigerator. There's blood in my hair.

It reminds me of the time I was hit by a motorcycle in Istanbul. I panic and rush downstairs to the pharmacy down the street. Did you get in a fight? Asked the pharmacist. I avoid the question.

It seems better than admitting my refrigerator attacked me. He gives me iodine, some cotton swabs, and pills. I head home. Movie time. Movies I can't even log on letterboxed.

What I end up watching over the next forty eight hours is highly ironic.

All I have are negative thoughts.

Joker. No wizard that there is or was. Wicked. You can act

like a man.

The Godfather

You can stop my war.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame I will decide. And doubt What's important. The next forty eight hours are a blur of confusion and anticipation. Everyone is constantly checking to see if the Internet and phone services are back. Suha, a 20 year old online entrepreneur in Kabul, is in disbelief at the sudden cuts.

She can't fathom that the Islamic Emirate could be so audacious.

Because we all know that every system of a country is reliant on Internet and technology in general.

Turns out she was wrong.

Unfortunately, in our society that turned out to be possible.

Once people move beyond the shock, it's two days full of speculation and rumors. Did Donald Trump really live up to his threats? And is he actually at the Bagram Air Base right now? Is the Islamic Emirates secretive supreme leader, Habatullah Khunzada, in Kabul, and we just don't know it? Or is all of this the setup for a coup d'etat that we don't even know is underway?

Something that my parents' generation are very used to by now. Farah works for an Internet provider and teaches online, and she describes the uncertainty that pervades over Kabul. She says being so cut off from the city, country, and the entire world left her feeling like a child. Greatest fear is that this marked the beginning of the end. The moment we had all been dreading since 08/15/2021 when the former president ran away and the Taliban returned to Kabul.

Are we officially going back to the strict rule of the nineteen nineties Islamic Emirate? Really though, these forty eight hours are a reminder of just how much of our lives in the twenty first century depend on the Internet. Al Saeed, a resident of the northern city of Mazar Sharif, puts it

Basically, all life, social life, everything, it all came to standstill.

I'm a journalist, and I have to wonder what the world is saying. Obviously, there's no way to check, but I still have to ask, has it made the news? Are people talking about it? Am I being bombarded with media requests I can't possibly respond to? Do they know I can't respond?

As the hours pass, all any of us can do is constantly check our phones as we slowly realize how many simple things we can no longer do. In Mazar Sharif, Afghanistan's main city in the North, Syed notices just how much financial transactions are affected.

The money exchanges were shut, financial services overall were halted, banks were closed, there was no real access to money.

Samir from the western city of Herod, one of Afghanistan's business and touristic hubs, notices that the 17 kilometer road leading to the airport is strangely quiet.

Flights were all canceled. No flights in or out of Iraq.

Though I myself live only a few minutes from Kabul International, airplanes didn't even cross my mind. At least not until I unexpectedly run into a friend I hadn't seen in what seemed like years after getting takeaway from a Yemeni restaurant. If you can't have the Internet, you can at least have chicken kabzah. Masood and I are sitting in the tables outside the ice cream shop. We're talking about our primary concern, the fact that the ATMs are all off and neither of us ever bothered to open a bank account in Afghanistan.

This means I have to come back every few hours and check if the machines are working again. At least I'm getting my steps in. Over pistachio and vanilla ice cream at the mall, I tell Masud that if the ATMs don't reopen, I'll have to ask a rich doctor relative for a cash loan to tide me over. It all brings me back to August 2021 when the Taliban had just returned to power and the entire financial system was in disarray.

People's access to banks and to cash remains a real problem. The banks have largely remained closed. When they are open, there are strict limits on how much you can withdraw.

At the time, I had to beg my employer to send me US dollars because I was down to the equivalent of $11 in Afghanis. The effects of this Internet shutdown are much worse, though.

Business online. There is Instagram. I ran an online clothing business via Instagram, and I had clients who had orders that needed to be delivered for their events on those days.

Suha, the online entrepreneur, says it costs her hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in business.

But I couldn't get their orders to them because I couldn't even get in contact with the delivery companies who would deliver their orders. By the time the Internet was restored, most of them had canceled their orders because they needed them on those specific dates for their events. And since I couldn't deliver their orders on time, they just canceled them entirely. For

a small business in Kabul, even that much can have a devastating effect. I've gone to Ramin, a tailor, to sew everything from avani clothes to sheets for years and he reminds me how small businesses are so interlinked. When I enter the store he's talking to another colleague while staring intently at a sheet of measurements. A client had an event to go to that night, and they were trying to remember how he wanted his clothes cut. Only there was no way to reach him.

He invited 700 people to this wedding. Only 200 show up. 500 people didn't come the wedding. We had a bunch of customers, who had events on that time and just had to cancel them.

It's not just small businesses, though. Mohammad, an NGO worker, said the macroeconomic effects were sprawling.

For instance, businesses that had goods coming from outside, their products were stacked at customs because imports and exports were stopped.

Samir lives in Herat, a province that lies directly along the 921 kilometer border with Iran. He saw just how much cross border trade, whether that be goods or currency exchanges, were affected.

The money exchange were left with nothing to do to find out the exchange rates. The exchange will have to go all the way to Islamabad border until the Internet actually was restored. Every day at 8AM, something like a thousand cars would go to border and stay until two 02:30 in the afternoon.

Faid from Mazor E Sharif, considered one of Afghanistan's main connection points to Central Asia, said being cut off from regional trade also affected domestic markets.

People

had no idea how to price things, what to sell something for, whether it was the commodities or money markets. It was all shut. No one knew how to price things.

But

you didn't have to travel far to see the impacts. Even the most basic aspects of daily social life are impacted.

You know how we are. If someone goes out and they are even a little late, we are quick to call them and see where they are. But, obviously, no one could get any information. We had to do, like, back in the day and send someone out to the street to find out where that person was.

What Saiz is describing is something that annoys all Afghans, the fact that your parents are constantly calling. Some people, though, had actual reasons to be concerned with the fact that you couldn't even make a phone call to check on a relative or a friend. Hamed, an NGO worker in Kabul, says a colleague of his lived through what we were all so afraid of, not being able to get in contact during an actual emergency situation.

One of my colleagues in the office lives in Kabul, but he is from Khazni province. And that very morning, his mother had died. Since phones were not working either, his brother had to come to Kabul. When he got to the house, his family informed him that his brother was in the office. So he went to the office, but even there, since he couldn't call his brother to come out, he was denied entry to the office.

He had to create quite a scene and finally, when the security came out to talk to him directly, explain the situation. It took until noon to sort out, and then they headed to Khazni. By the time they reached Khazni, the funeral of their late mother had almost taken place. So these were the issues, and all had such challenges.

Farah, who works for an Internet provider, says being cut off came at an especially trying time for her. She had just lost her father a few days prior. With no Internet or mobile phone access, she felt utterly alone at one of the most difficult times of her life. Given the uncertainty and confusion that had gripped the city, Farah said she couldn't even will herself to go out and try to find her friends herself. But some people seem to find the strangest silver linings.

Jabbar, a 22 year old student in Kabul, says when people aren't scrolling through their phones, they can actually look at one another, even talk to each other.

What else is there to do?

Well, whatever happened to that game we used to play before television was invented? It was called conversation. In the twenty first century, mobile phones have clearly replaced television, especially in the Islamic Emirate where so much of what can be broadcast is so tightly regulated.

The shutdown of the Internet did have some benefits. Though, because people's addiction to the Internet was very real, people weren't speaking to one another or hanging out with each other in person. This did create the opportunity for people to actually have to sit down and talk with one another directly for a few days instead of being glued to the Internet to find time for their families.

Turns out, other people were thinking pretty much the same thing Because within hours of the Internet being restored on the afternoon of October 1, there was a video on TikTok that said pretty much the same thing.

Baba Sameer. Baba Sameer. The Internet is fixed. The Internet is fixed? Really?

Yes. Forget it. What do you need with the Internet? For the two nights that there was no Internet, I sat with my family. They're such good people.

My little nephew has gotten so big. I swear to God, now I know I have a family.

October 1 also happens to be Jabbar's birthday. I'm on my way there for dinner when I stop outside a samosa shop to buy some for the gathering. From the corner of my eye, I see something I haven't seen in forty eight hours. A man is speaking Pashto into his phone. Clocking that I'm incredulous, the Samosa seller says in Pashto, yeah, it just came back.

I immediately check my phone. There are bars. I start to get alerts from WhatsApp, Instagram, Outlook. Before the food comes up, I'm on my phone. The first thing I do is call my mother in California.

After she scolds me for a few seconds, she asks me for the details of what it's like. She's surprisingly speaking of it like some kind of neighborhood gossip rather than a test of a nation's endurance in the twenty first century. Walking to the birthday party, I see everyone joyfully looking at their phones, calling and happily posing for their first post in two days. When I get to the party, it's all documented on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat. I'm taken by how quickly everything returns to normal.

Almost as if the last forty eight hours were all just

Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

Less than thirty minutes after everything turns back on, everyone is back on their phones. It's a cacophony of TikTok videos and Instagram reels that fill the room. The fervor, confusion, and worry are all gone. Everyone is sated once again. I was sitting there watching men and women, young and old, boomers to Gen X to millennials to Gen Z, all returning to normal.

I'm struck by how quickly and easily everyone falls back into their old habits. Maybe I'm naive, but I had just spent the last few weeks helping with the coverage of Gen z protests that led to the downfall of the government in Nepal, something that was kick started by a proposed social media ban. A year prior, I had helped cover the downfall of Bangladesh's autocratic leader, Sheikh Hasina, which came after weeks of youth led protests. Similar Gen Z protests had taken place across Indonesia and The Philippines. I had hoped that in Afghanistan, after forty eight hours of being cut off from each other and the whole world, there would be at least something more.

If not anger and people taking to the streets, then at least people discussing what had happened, thinking about it, any reaction. It didn't have to be anger, but just something to show that a major unprecedented world event had just taken place for all of us. But it turns out in Afghanistan, we were all just happy to be back online. I think back to the song. By the next morning, October 2, I'm at a cafe, MacBook and iPhone in hand.

There is some lingering talk, mostly, wasn't that weird? And I'm glad it's back, but that's really the most of it. I'm left to wonder, is this the end result of our social media obsessed society? Have we really become the humans in Wall E, gluttonous and obsessed with what's in front of our faces? Have we as a global society become like the resident of Aldous Huxley's London, hooked to Soma?

In this case, content on Instagram, on TikTok, and YouTube. Or in a country that in my parents' lifetime saw an absolute monarchy turn to a constitutional one, to pseudo democracy, to Soviet occupied communism, to a majority led government, to the first Taliban Islamic Emirate, to an approximation of Western democracy under US occupation, to a second Taliban run Islamic Emirate, have people just started to feel helpless and hopeless. The truth is I can't say I blame them. If the last few months have taught us anything, it's that this didn't end with the Islamic Emirate. Only a couple of weeks prior to Afghanistan's Internet blackout, pundits and politicians in The US were seriously questioning whether the Internet was to blame for the public killing of conservative firebrand, Charlie Kirk.

In 1999, video games and rock stars and to a lesser extent of still fledgling Internet were cast with the blame for Columbine. In 2025, the Internet and social media became the alleged accelerant of what was being billed as an inevitable spate of political killings.

When you consider that young men are often carrying out these kinds of acts of violence after becoming radicalized online.

I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years.

Australia banned social media for anyone 16. They say they'll help any other country implement such policies. India imposed a three hour deadline for platforms to delete anything the Modi government, which has long been accused of disenfranchising and abusing religious minorities, finds to be false or misleading. Joseph Gordon Levitt, the star of one of my favorite romantic comedies, The Five Hundred Days of Summer, called for section two thirty to be repealed. It protects companies from facing lawsuits over content users post on their platforms.

Larry Ellison, the noted Zionist and a close associate of Benjamin Netanyahu purchased TikTok in The US, a move that is lauded by everyone from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. It also resulted in allegations of censorship of pro Palestine voices on TikTok. The Islamic Emirate may have been the most stringent and the most sudden with their actions, but they're far from the only government in the world trying to control people's access to online content. In the end, we're still not certain what happened in Afghanistan. The Islamic Emirate acknowledged that communication was cut off for forty eight hours.

But as usual, they stopped short of any real explanation of why or how it happened. But maybe that's just it. As much as governments are working to restrict and regulate Internet access, the truth is it's become a part of our lives. When I sit and watch my family and friends in Afghanistan and The US scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, I realize that it's come to mean so much to so many. To my family in The US, it's their way of keeping track of daily life in Afghanistan.

They watch YouTubers and influencers travel the country. And then they ask me if I've been to the new million dollar restaurant or if I went to the same earthquake stricken villages of Herat and Pattikar they saw online. I'm old enough to remember waking up in the middle of the night as my parents screamed into the phone to check on relatives in Peshawar or trying to make their way out of Toshkant on what would be their long journey to the Bay Area suburbs I grew up in. To my family, friends, and neighbors in Afghanistan, the Internet is a window to the outside world, a world that looks strange and confounding at times. How could Kendall and Kylie let their father become a woman?

Why is the president of The United States blathering incoherently at a debate? And most importantly, have I finally managed to watch all of Naruto? Spoiler no. The Islamic Emirate is certainly portrayed as the most nefarious to do it, but it seems as if the lesson that the world learned from our forty eight hours is kind of basic. Yeah.

The Taliban are bad, but we're not them. A Taliban led government may get all the blame, but it seems like so many others are moving far too quickly to strip their citizens of rights to free speech and the Internet.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, March 19. Thank you so much to contributing producer Ali Latifi for this story. Thanks also to our pseudonymous Afghans for sharing their experiences. They were Suha, Farah, Saeed, Samir, Ramin, Mohammed, Hamid, and Jabbar.

Thanks also to the folks who revoiced their tape in English. Thank you to Sana Muradi, Fatima Hosseini, Haroun Rahimi, Nasir, Ahmad Azizi, and Said. Did you know you can become a member of Never Post for the low low low low low cost of $4 a month? It's true. Head on over to neverpo.st and become a member today to help us continue to make episodes like this one, which require significant time, effort, and cost.

The more support we have, the more adventurous and the more impactful stories we can produce. Neverpo.st, a measly $4 a month. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and the Mysterious, doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Vutto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Krugnetta.

One, these are the vague demands you make on me. Two, that I assemble. Two, recollect. Two, decode. Associate.

Three, that I admit fraught with difficulty. Reintegration is no day at the beach in eggshell tints. The inmates start to get brave and a little crazy when they hear that friendly voice, the matron. Four, but that's also my mind lost. Her epic poem on the constraints society places on the five, misunderstood.

Excerpt of Sybil by Rebecca Wolf. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.