When do websites blackout

In an email to Euronews, Fastly said there will be a Fastly Service Advisory document published "in due course," which should detail why the incident occurred. CDNs are a key part of the internet infrastructure. Companies around the world depend on banks of servers to improve internet performance and access to online services.

To disrupt the internet, authorities must order internet service providers ISPs to limit access for their subscribers. Toker told Al Jazeera that while some ISPs — which are often state-owned — readily comply with these orders, others have reportedly been held at gunpoint and forced to switch off the internet.

These orders are often made in secret and carried out by ISPs on an individual basis, meaning companies can sometimes choose which kind of filter to apply. In a content block, access to certain websites or apps is cut. This is frequently used to shut down social media, but has also been applied to news sites and other sources of information like Wikipedia.

China recently tightened its online restrictions ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests in early June by blocking access to the sites of international news organisations including CNN and Reuters. Bandwidth throttling is a more subtle approach, in which signals are made so weak and connections so low that the internet is effectively unusable.

Authorities can block VPNs but backlash from foreign diplomats and companies that use them means this rarely happens. Political — The most obvious impacts are political. Stemming the flow of information in and out of a country can throw reports of atrocities into doubt, making it difficult to mobilise the international community.

And search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing could be stopped from linking to them -- antithetical, they say, to the ideal of an open Internet.

Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site in the world, said its English version will be dark for 24 hours Wednesday, urging users to contact Congress.

Other joiners of the movement include Mozilla, which offers the Firefox Web browser; the Wordpress blogging site; and TwitPic, which allows Twitter users to post images online.

The House bill is on hold for now, and Sen. Patrick Leahy D. The White House over the weekend said it had reservations about the approach the two bills take. Chief Technology Officer. That isn't true.

The issue here is that this law is very badly written, very broadly overreaching In November, tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook lodged a formal complaint letter to lawmakers, saying: "We support the bills' stated goals. Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities and mandates that would require monitoring of websites.

The growing Internet protest against the online anti-piracy bill moving through Congress is "daunting," a Senate Democratic aide said Tuesday. The aide said the protest may be powerful enough to keep senators from voting to even take up the bill that until recently commanded rare bipartisan support.

It will either become a huge issue or die down a bit and that will determine the future of this. The aide said it was premature to say exactly how it will play out but acknowledged that because of protest from Internet mainstays such as Google and Wikipedia "the merits of the bill are getting lost" and "sand is shifting pretty quickly" against it.