When Afghanistan Went Dark: Inside the Taliban’s 48-Hour Internet Blackout

When Afghanistan Went Dark: Inside the Taliban’s 48-Hour Internet Blackout

A nationwide shutdown that grounded flights, froze banks, and silenced millions has revealed the deep fractures inside Taliban leadership—and raised new alarms for businesses and investors dealing with fragile states.

KABUL — For two full days at the end of September, Afghanistan all but disappeared from the digital map.

Starting late on Monday, September 29, internet traffic plummeted to barely 1% of normal. Phones stopped working. Departure boards at Kabul airport displayed nothing but “unknown.” Banks either halted transactions or ran on stale data. By the time connections limped back on October 1, Afghans had lived through one of the most sweeping blackouts seen anywhere in recent years—and the world had gotten a rare glimpse into how shaky the Taliban’s grip on power really is.

A blackout that wasn’t an accident

The outage didn’t hit all at once. First, networks slowed in certain provinces. Then, like falling dominoes, mobile and internet service vanished across the country. Taliban officials quickly blamed “technical problems,” but experts who tracked the collapse saw a different story. The pattern pointed not to broken cables but to deliberate orders pushed down from the top.

Hints of what was coming had already surfaced in September. Provincial authorities in the north began cutting fiber lines, claiming they were fighting “immorality.” Reports in Kabul suggested operators had been given a week to shut down 3G and 4G, leaving only bare-bones 2G. When the Associated Press briefly ran a story blaming Afghanistan’s crumbling infrastructure, they retracted it. The timeline told a different story—this wasn’t decay, it was design.

Afghanistan’s internet relies heavily on cables that run through Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia. Pulling the plug nationally required coordination across multiple networks at once. That kind of precision, analysts say, makes one thing clear: the blackout was no accident.

A government running on empty

The blackout wasn’t just about controlling information. It exposed how cash-strapped and divided the Taliban government has become.

Since late 2024, ministries have closed, civil servants have been dismissed, and spending has been cut to the bone. Hopes for sanctions relief never materialized, despite attempts by figures like former president Hamid Karzai to coax Europe into reopening embassies.

Inside the movement, money has deepened old rivalries. Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada holds religious authority but little financial muscle. The Haqqani network, flush with its own income streams, has resisted ceding control. In January 2025, Akhundzada elevated a hardline veteran known as Shirin, whose ties to Iran, Russia, and Pakistan have pulled policy even further to the right—widening cracks in an already fragile system.

With few resources, the Taliban have funneled what money they do have into farming and water projects to stave off hunger. Yet salaries often go unpaid for half a year or more. In several provinces, Haqqani operatives have stepped in to fund local operations, leaving Afghanistan with a dangerous split between who pays the bills and who claims authority.

Everyday life in the dark

For Afghans, the consequences were immediate and painful.

Women and girls, already heavily restricted, lost one of their last ways to access education and speak with the outside world. Aid groups couldn’t coordinate deliveries. Flights were grounded because airlines couldn’t connect to booking systems or safety networks.

Banks froze, forcing families to rely on hawala—informal money networks that have long filled the gaps in fragile economies. Small businesses stalled. Schools that had carved out limited online options for students saw even those slammed shut.

Service began trickling back on October 1, but patchily. Some regions got a flicker of unstable connectivity before others. By October 2, most of the country was back online. Yet Taliban officials offered no clear explanation—another sign, observers argue, that factions inside the leadership can’t even agree on how far to push information control.

Investors face a new playbook

For companies with stakes in Afghanistan, the blackout is a chilling warning.

Telecom providers such as AWCC, Roshan, and ATOMA (the former MTN) now know the Taliban can and will flip the switch nationwide. Plans to force networks onto 2G only mean shrinking revenues and higher costs for compliance. Investors are already bracing for lower valuations and tougher financing.

The risks don’t stop there. Much of Afghanistan’s internet flows through neighboring countries. Carriers earning revenue from those routes now face policy risks that could spook shareholders. And for the budding satellite industry promising direct-to-device internet, the blackout underscores both the opportunity and the challenge. Space-based systems can bypass fiber, but Afghanistan’s restrictions on imports make local adoption uncertain.

Remittance flows, a lifeline for many families, briefly shifted underground during the outage but quickly bounced back. Airlines serving Kabul may now add extra safeguards to schedules and face higher insurance costs tied to communication risk.

Analysts are watching closely for signs of repeat blackouts. If another nationwide cut comes within a month, it could signal that pulling the plug has become standard Taliban practice rather than an emergency tool.

Toward a national intranet?

Some experts believe the Taliban might try to copy Iran or even North Korea by building a state-run intranet—severed from the global web and heavily filtered. Financing such a system would require outside help, perhaps through deals trading mineral rights or future taxes.

But the blackout proved something else: Afghanistan can’t stay offline forever. Shutting everything down grounded planes, halted trade, and disrupted aid. The regime may experiment with regional cuts or rolling restrictions instead—tight enough to control, loose enough to avoid full collapse.

What comes next

As Afghans slowly reconnect, uncertainty looms. The Taliban now have both the means and the precedent for future blackouts. Whether they wield that power sparingly or turn it into routine repression depends largely on the outcome of their internal struggles and whether they can secure new sources of revenue.

For investors and international players, the lesson travels far beyond Kabul. Internet access can no longer be assumed as a given in states where rulers control infrastructure. Risk models that once treated connectivity as a stable constant must now reckon with how easily it can become a weapon—one flipped on and off in the heat of political battles.