Pakistan: Blocking of Wikipedia and Deutsche Welle (DW)

Maria Xynou, Arturo Filastò 2023-02-15

Over the past weeks, access to Wikipedia and Deutsche Welle’s (DW) website was reportedly blocked in Pakistan.

As part of this report, we share OONI data from Pakistan that provides signals of these blocks. Specifically, OONI data shows that access to Wikipedia was temporarily restricted between 1st to 6th February 2023, while access to Deutsche Welle (DW) remains blocked since (at least) 16th January 2023.

Blocking of Deutsche Welle

As of 16th January 2023, OONI data suggests that access to Deutsche Welle’s (DW) website (which provides an Urdu language service for Pakistan) has been blocked on multiple networks in Pakistan – and that the block remains ongoing. This was brought to our attention by Oliver Linow, an Internet Freedom Specialist working with DW, who tweeted about it sharing OONI data.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the OONI Probe testing of DW’s website (www.dw.com) on all tested networks (10 ASNs) in Pakistan. As is evident, almost all measurements collected between 16th January 2023 to 13th February 2023 (excluding a few failed measurements on 7th and 8th February 2023) presented anomalies, providing signs of blocking.

Chart: OONI Probe testing of Deutsche Welle’s website (www.dw.com) on multiple networks in Pakistan between 1st January 2023 to 13th February 2023 (source: OONI MAT).

The fact that most measurements from 16th January 2023 onwards presented anomalies (along with the fact that previous measurements in early January 2023 were successful) provides an indication of blocking. Moreover, we observe that these anomalies occurred during the same period (between 16th January 2023 to 13th February 2023) on most tested networks in Pakistan. Out of the 10 tested ASNs, we observe anomalies on 8 networks. On the other 2 ASNs (AS138910 and AS9260), there is no data available from 16th January onwards to draw any conclusions (on AS138910 www.dw.com was not tested after 1st January 2023, while on AS9260 the site was only tested once on 7th February 2023, and that experiment failed).

The following chart provides a per-ASN breakdown of the OONI Probe measurement coverage of www.dw.com within this period, limited to the 8 ASNs where we observe anomalies.

Chart: ASNs in Pakistan where the OONI Probe testing of www.dw.com presented anomalies between 1st January 2023 to 13th February 2023 (source: OONI MAT).

We can see that the testing of www.dw.com started to present anomalies on 16th January 2023 on Pakistan Telecommunication Company (AS17557) – which is the largest ISP in Pakistan. This is also the network which received the largest testing coverage in the following weeks. We observe most anomalies on all tested networks from 2nd February 2023 onwards, which is also when www.dw.com was tested on more networks. However, it remains unclear if the potential block started before 16th January 2023, as www.dw.com was not tested by OONI Probe users in Pakistan between 7th to 15th January 2023.

By looking at the anomalous measurements, we can see that almost the totality of failing measurements result in connection reset errors.

Chart: Measurement failures that occurred when www.dw.com was tested in Pakistan between 16th January 2023 to 14th February 2023 (source: OONI data).

When we do observe a connection reset, this always occurs right after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake.

Overall, the blocking of DW’s website in Pakistan is suggested by OONI data because:

Blocking of Wikipedia

On 1st February 2023, Pakistan’s Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced that they had degraded Wikipedia services in the country as a result of non-compliance by Wikipedia with their request to block or remove sacrilegious content. PTA specified that they would degrade Wikipedia services for 48 hours, noting that a block could follow if Wikimedia Foundation did not comply with the takedown requests.

On 3rd February 2023, Wikimedia Foundation published a statement notifying the public of PTA’s decision, stating that (as of that day) their internal traffic reports indicated that Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects were no longer available to users in Pakistan, and urging PTA to restore access to their services. This statement was updated on 6th February 2023 with a notification that PTA had been directed to restore access to Wikipedia in Pakistan, and that this was confirmed by their internal traffic team.

Interestingly, both the timing and nature of this reported block appears to be corroborated by OONI data collected from Pakistan.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) on multiple networks in Pakistan between 1st January 2023 to 13th February 2023. As is evident, we only observe anomalies between 1st to 6th February 2023, which coincides with the aforementioned period when access to Wikipedia was interfered with.

Chart: OONI Probe testing of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) on multiple networks in Pakistan between 1st January 2023 to 13th February 2023 (source: OONI MAT).

Between 1st to 6th February 2023, www.wikipedia.org was tested on 5 ASNs in Pakistan, and presented anomalies on all networks, as illustrated below.

Chart: ASNs in Pakistan which received OONI Probe testing of www.wikipedia.org between 1st January 2023 to 13th February 2023 (source: OONI MAT).

Similarly to the testing of www.dw.com (discussed previously), we observe that most www.wikipedia.org testing was carried out on Pakistan Telecommunication Company (AS17557) – which is also the country’s largest ISP. Most measurements from that network presented anomalies between 1st to 6th February 2023, and we also observed anomalies when www.wikipedia.org was tested on 4 other ASNs during this period.

Wikipedia blocking is indicated by the fact that we observe anomalies on multiple networks during the same period, while all measurements (excluded measurements from failed experiments) from 7th February 2023 onwards were successful. The latter also suggests that access to Wikipedia was unblocked on 6th February 2023, particularly since we start to observe many successful measurements that day.

By looking at the anomalous measurements, we observe that most measurements collected on 1st and 2nd February resulted in timeout errors, which is consistent with PTA’s announced 48-hour degradation of Wikipedia services. Between 3rd to 6th February 2023, we observe that most measurements resulted in connection reset errors (which is consistent with what we observed in the blocking of www.dw.com), suggesting that ISPs switched to blocking access to Wikipedia on 3rd February 2023 (which is what both PTA and Wikimedia Foundation announced). This was also reported by Vinicius Fortuna (Engineering lead of Google’s Jigsaw Internet Freedom team), who analyzed OONI data and shared these findings on social media.

Chart: Measurement failures that occurred when www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org were tested in Pakistan between 1st January 2023 to 14th February 2023 (source: OONI data).

From the above chart, we can also see that the testing of en.wikipedia.org presents similar results to the testing of www.wikipedia.org. Moreover, we observe that both en.wikipedia.org and www.wikipedia.org presented the same failures between 1st to 6th February 2023, with both domains presenting connection timeouts during the TLS handshake on 1st and 2nd February 2023, and connection resets between 3rd to 6th February 2023. The consistent pattern observed for both domains provides a stronger signal of blocking.

Similarly to what was reported by Wikimedia Foundation, OONI data shows that access to Wikipedia was restored on 6th February 2023.

Conclusion

Over the years, Wikipedia has been blocked in several other countries as well, including China, Venezuela, and Iran.

Past OONI research (involving the analysis of OONI data collected between 2014 to 2017) has shown that ISPs in Pakistan censored content that was viewed as blasphemous, serving as a precedent for the recent blocking of Wikipedia. While OONI data has previously shown the blocking of news media websites in Pakistan during Islamist protests in November 2017, this is likely the first time that we are noticing the blocking of an international media website (Deutsche Welle) in Pakistan.

We thank OONI Probe users in Pakistan who contributed measurements, supporting this study. You can continue to monitor the testing of services in Pakistan through the OONI Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT), which publishes OONI measurements as open data in real-time.