Social media slowdown detected in Turkey after assassination of Russian ambassador

The Turkey Blocks monitoring network has detected severe slowdowns affecting Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp for some, but not all, internet users in Turkey.

Access timings show that the restrictions began around 8:45PM local time and ended 6:00AM the morning after.

Neither the country’s most popular ISP TTNet nor mobile providers initially appeared to be affected. Network analysis of the slowdown, which renders social media services effectively unusable, has revealed slightly different characteristics to previous social media shutdowns following national emergencies.

It’s not known why some operators didn’t implement the apparent shutdown, though precedent exists for refusal to implement a shutdown. Bloomberg reports for example that mobile operator Turkcell refused internet shutdown orders that kept most of the country off social media for several hours on the night of the 15 July abortive coup.

The social media shutdown comes shortly after the fatal shooting of Russia Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov and the imposition of a national broadcast ban.