Macedonia tastes the fruit of censorhip (again)

Tags: 

The second student protest against external tests which would terminate the autonomy of universities in Macedonia was held today in Skopje form 12 to 15 hours local time.

Sometime around 12:30 the major mobile network in Macedonia - T-mobile went down. Many people reported problems with the other mobile networks too. I didn't have access to service for almost 3 hours. The outage was city-wide.

T-mobile said in a statement that they had a short disruption of services due to technical difficulties. Their statement is - at least - questionable.

Whatever the true reason for lack of service, the fact is that all of the mobile operators had problems during the protest and service was swiftly restored sometime after 15 hours local time.

It is difficult to imagine a "technical difficulty" that would disable three networks at the same time and for the same period of hours. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the denial of service was planned to ensure that no live information was published on-line so that the media can be controlled to the extent that is possible.

This is what censorship looks like.