If you are a member of Android Kenya‘s Telegram channel living in Kenya, chances are that you won’t immediately get an alert about the existence of this post as soon as I hit “publish”.
Why?
Well, as you may have noticed over the last few days, Telegram appears to be having widespread unexplained issues that are only unique to the country.
When it first happened to me, I thought it was one of those global outages that services experience from time to time. They’re rare but they do happen. Only that, this time round, the outages didn’t stop. I still had issues accessing Telegram the next day, the day after that and so on and so on. This has been indiscriminate. On the smartphone, on the desktop… Telegram just doesn’t work.
And when it does, it’s intermittent. A message that you may have received on the desktop app remains undelivered on the mobile app…
It appears, as many have been speculating, that the Telegram outages in the country are directly linked to the ongoing Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) national examinations.
Cheating cases reported earlier on when the exam started last month pointed to Telegram being one of the popular avenues for the spread of leaked exam papers. Some Telegram group admins have since been arrested.
The Communications Authority of Kenya had flagged 32 Telegram channels and groups with nearly 200,000 members comprising parents to exam candidates, teachers of the said candidates and the candidates themselves. The channels and groups had been identified by a monitoring unit of the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC), the administrator of the ongoing secondary school exams.
Global internet censorship watcher Open Observatory of Network Interference, which tracks, measures and documents internet censorship, has traced a pattern around the Telegram downtimes in the country that appear to corroborate the assertion and earlier speculation that they are tied to the ongoing exams.
🔴 For the first time, we are observing the blocking of @telegram in #Kenya.
Amid national exams (#KCSE2023), OONI data shows intermittent signs of Telegram blocking on several networks. The timings of the blocks correlate with the timing of the exams.
More info below 👇 pic.twitter.com/PxaK3IOuBs
— OONI (@OpenObservatory) November 16, 2023
“OONI data shows that the TCP* handshake is successful and that it only times out after the connection is established. This, coupled with the precise correlation with the timing of the exams, provides a strong indication of intentional Telegram blocking in Kenya,” they shared on X, formerly, Twitter.
*TCP is short for “Transmission Control Protocol”, the communications standard that allows apps and devices to successfully exchange data over networks, if we are to explain it to you in simple terms.
Now that we have established that access to Telegram in Kenya is being throttled and/or completely blocked, what precedent does this set? What does it mean for the future of internet access in the country? What’s next? X? YouTube? Is it the start of a long journey down the murky road of internet censorship? In a country that is purportedly a democracy and with a progressive constitution that guarantees free speech?
The answers to those questions are, obviously, beyond the scope of this publication. However, what is within the scope of what we do here at Android Kenya is telling you how to circumvent this apparent censorship.
Using a VPN app and setting one’s location to some other country, as many are finding out, appears to be doing the trick and bypassing the censorship. While our list of VPN apps you can use in circumstances such as these is very outdated (it’s 5 years old, after all), you can still find one or two apps in there that you can use in these dark times. Check it out.
