#NoExamShutdown: lessons for the new academic year
As the 2025–2026 academic year begins, students across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are returning to classrooms with sharpened pencils, blank copybooks, and renewed hopes — although not everyone in the region has that chance. In Gaza, where schools and universities have been reduced to rubble or converted into makeshift shelters, more than 660,000 students are entering a third consecutive year without access to education, while in southern Lebanon more than 100 schools in the south were destroyed or heavily damaged during Israel’s 2024 assault. Elsewhere, classrooms are reopening under the shadow of a troubling regional trend: the disproportionate, misguided, and ineffective use of exam-related internet shutdowns to supposedly stop cheating. As part of our ongoing #NoExamShutdown campaign, Access Now, SMEX, and the Internet Society urge MENA governments to end this counterproductive practice. This year, we saw a familiar pattern of disruptions repeated across multiple countries, yet there were also small but notable signs of change — and hope for the future.
✎ Iraq: 51 shutdowns in four months
Between late May and mid September, Iraq experienced 51 internet shutdowns. Of these, 35 were nationwide and 16 were regional, and all were linked to exams; from middle school to high school, across both Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan region. That’s equivalent to nearly one blackout every other day, disrupting the lives not only of students but everyone else, including workers, small businesses, and more. With the short-lived exception of 2023, when the Iraqi Ministry of Communications refused to shut down the internet, Iraq has become one of the most persistent abusers of exam-related shutdowns, repeating the practice across multiple levels of education and normalizing collective punishment for a problem that deserves smarter, rights-respecting solutions.
✎ Syria: 11 disruptions in six weeks
In Syria, routine shutdowns are a continuation of the country’s long and painful legacy of isolation and control over the internet and telecommunication infrastructure. This year, from June 21 to August 3, there were 11 nationwide internet shutdowns coinciding with school exams, affecting both mobile and broadband users.
Despite years of criticism, and the Ministry of Education’s adoption of an encrypted exam delivery system in 2021, the practice has continued, even after the fall of the Assad regime. These shutdowns deny people the ability to communicate, cutting them off from loved ones, from humanitarian aid, and from the outside world. As the new school season begins, Syria must finally break with this relic from its dark past and build towards a better digital future.
✎ Sudan: Four mobile-only blackouts in July
After being postponed for nearly two years by the ongoing brutal civil war, Sudan’s most recent Certificate Examinations finally happened in December 2024. Authorities had announced plans to shut down the internet ahead of time, consistent with their pattern of disrupting the internet during exam periods, but ultimately no shutdowns were reported.
In contrast, during the next exam period in July 2025, four mobile internet shutdowns took place between July 7-10. Each lasted around three hours, coinciding with daily exams sessions, but their timing was puzzling: the shutdowns only began midway through the exam period running from June 29 to July 10 (except Fridays). This raised doubts as to whether the cuts were truly exam-related, with some suggesting they may rather have been tied to broader information control efforts. Sudan’s government did not acknowledge the disruptions, but local media reported them and monitoring confirmed they overlapped with the aforementioned exam days.
For students, families, and businesses, the effect was the same: a stark reminder that in Sudan, the line between being connected and being cut off remains paper thin.
✎ Algeria and Jordan’s homework remains incomplete
Algeria set the low bar for exam shutdowns in 2016, when it began imposing nationwide shutdowns during Baccalaureate exams, which cut millions of people off from work, study, and daily life. However, in recent years the government has pivoted to focus on blocking specific messaging apps during exam hours, instead of resorting to full shutdowns — perhaps thanks to public pressure and civil society advocacy. In 2025, this more targeted approach meant many people reported few or no impacts. However, such disruptions still disproportionately restrict people’s rights, censoring their right to freedom of expression and limiting access to information.
Algeria’s Minister of Education has admitted that “one of the means used so far [to combat cheating and preserve the integrity of exams] has been cutting the internet,” but has also said that alternatives to shutdowns and blocking would be adopted so long as they did not harm economic operators and merchants.
Jordan has also shifted its approach to exam-time disruptions in recent years, but the pattern remains troubling and speaks to the country’s broader crackdown on connectivity. For years, authorities blocked messaging apps during Tawjihi (General Secondary Certificate) exams, and although 2023 came and went without any reported shutdowns, blocks were reinstated in 2024. In 2025, officials announced plans to restrict access during exam hours. According to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, nine messaging apps were temporarily blocked by cutting service from a few cell towers near exam centers for about 90 minutes a day, just before exams began. Meanwhile calls and SMS service remained available. This localized, time-limited method is harder to track, which may explain why fewer incidents were reported, especially amid the wider regional turmoil of the Iran–Israel war.
➞ Grading MENA governments on shutdowns
For years, governments across the MENA region have turned to internet shutdowns as a “silver bullet” solution to prevent exam cheating. But these disruptions are not only ineffective, they violate fundamental human rights. Instead of addressing the problem of cheating with effective, evidence-based solutions, shutdowns deepen people’s frustration with authorities, widen the gap between institutions and the people they serve, and slow down recovery in moments of crisis and conflict, leaving scars that linger long after connections are restored and exams are completed.
➞ Turning the page: a call to #KeepItOn this year
The intermittent, albeit limited, progress seen in Algeria, for instance, shows that change is possible, and that governments can opt for solutions rooted in trust and innovation rather than censorship and control. But this is not enough. Elsewhere, authorities are doubling down, escalating restrictions year after year and slipping back into bad habits.
This academic year, we urge all MENA governments to #KeepItOn; to reject the false promise of control through disconnection and instead write a new story — one that protects education without harming millions of people’s rights. We call on the international community to stand firm against shutdowns. And we call on people across MENA and the world to remember that this isn’t just about staying online during exams; it is about refusing to be cut off from each other, from truth, from exercising our rights and freedoms, and from the futures we all deserve.
If you were affected by an exam-related internet disruption this year, your voice matters. Share your story to amplify the call for #NoExamShutdown.
Note on methodology: The figures in this blog reflect the total number of individual disruptions observed during exam periods. As part of the #KeepItOn Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP) dataset, however, Access Now counts shutdown instances by each exam period rather than each individual disruption, roughly corresponding to the number of times authorities make the deliberate choice to shut down the internet before each exam period begins. This means that the numbers in this blog may differ from our future annual reporting. For more details, read our STOP methodology FAQ (see: “What metrics do we use to track and report on shutdowns? Why do we count shutdowns differently depending on context?”).