Iraq switches off the internet at the same hour every exam morning: what the signal shows

On 25 mornings between 2 June and 10 September 2026 the same thing happened in Iraq: about two thirds of the country's connectivity disappeared at the same hour and came back as if nothing had happened. It never happened on a Friday. This is not a fault. It is the signature of a shutdown ordered for the hours of national school exams, and this is how our monitor first noticed it and then measured it.

First the monitor noticed

Our outage monitor checks every country once an hour. In Iraq the hourly check kept returning the same oddity: a drop of 66 to 69 percent in the reading taken just after 04:00 UTC, which is 07:00 in Baghdad, with normal readings an hour earlier and an hour later. A drop that returns at the same hour on three or more days within three weeks is not something our detector files under technical outages: it is classified as a scheduled shutdown. A cable fault or a power failure does not keep office hours.

Then it re-measured

An hourly check is enough to notice a pattern, but not to measure a window shorter than an hour. So once the pattern is recognised, the monitor changes its method: it goes back over every morning at full resolution, routing visibility (BGP) every 5 minutes and active probing every 10, and finds the start, the end and the depth of each window. The result for Iraq is on the country page, morning by morning. In short:

• Same depth every time. Active probing loses 67 to 71 percent on every one of the 25 mornings.
• Routes are withdrawn, not just blocked. Usually 16 to 18 percent of Iraq's routed networks disappear from the global routing table for the length of the window. On 2 June it was 59 percent and on 11 June 47 percent, so on those two mornings the switch reached further than usual.
• No Fridays. Friday is the weekly day off in Iraq and there are no exams. Not one of the 25 windows falls on a Friday.
• Nine mornings the hourly check never saw. The re-measurement found 25 windows; the hourly monitor had caught 16 of them. The edges of each window are accurate to about ten minutes, the step of the underlying data.

Who goes dark and who does not

When the country-level signal drops, our monitor measures the leading providers one by one. It did so on 16 of the 25 mornings, and the result was identical every time:

The line runs exactly along the administrative border. Providers licensed by the federal government in Baghdad disappear completely. Providers of the Kurdistan Region, which runs its own education system and its own exam calendar, keep working, and so does satellite access. That is why the national figure stops at about two thirds instead of reaching one hundred percent: the remaining third is the Kurdistan Region and everything that does not pass through federal gateways.

What the authorities say

There is no need to guess at the cause. According to Internet Society Pulse, the Iraqi government ordered the suspension of internet services on the morning of 1 September 2026 between 06:20 and 07:10 local time, as part of a series covering the second round of the middle school exams, scheduled to run until 12 September. The same source notes that this series lasts 50 minutes per morning, compared with 90 minutes in the earlier series between 13 June and 4 July, and that the Ministry of Communications announced the measure on 19 May. The minister said a digital system for distributing exam papers is planned, which would remove the reason for the shutdowns.

Exams in the first days of September look odd to anyone used to a school year that opens on 1 September. In Iraq the year starts later: for 2026-2027 the Ministry of Education first set 20 September and then moved the start to 11 October, partly to finish the second-round exams. The second round is the repeat sitting of the national exams, held at the end of summer for pupils who did not pass a subject in June. So the classrooms are empty, but the exam halls are not.

Our two series match those two exam rounds, and the window we measured on 1 September, 06:30 to 07:10, sits inside the officially reported 06:20 to 07:10 to within the ten-minute step of the data. One detail differs: the same signature is already present in our measurements from 2 June, eleven days before the date given for the start of the first series.

Why a cable site cares

Iraq reaches the sea at a single point. All of its submarine capacity lands at Al Faw on the Gulf: FALCON, GBICS/MENA, Fibre in Gulf and 2Africa. When a whole country drops, the first question is whether one of these systems failed. Here the answer is no, and the pattern proves it: no cable fault restores itself within the hour, 25 times, on a school timetable, while leaving one region of the country untouched.

The same reasoning applies elsewhere. Exam-hour shutdowns have been used in several countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and a national drop is not always an accident. Our monitor now handles this on its own: a country that goes down at the same hour on three or more days within three weeks is classified as a scheduled shutdown rather than a technical outage, and from that moment every morning is re-measured at full resolution. At the moment Iraq is the only country in our record that fits. The live state of every country is on the outage monitor, and ordered shutdowns are listed on the shutdown detector.

Sources

• GeoCables outage monitor: measured shutdown windows in Iraq. Signals: BGP visibility (5-minute step) and active probing (10-minute step) from IODA (Georgia Tech); provider shares from APNIC population estimates.
• Internet Society Pulse: Exams shutdown, Iraq, 1 September 2026.
• Iraqi News: Iraq postpones start of 2026-2027 academic year to October 11.