• Safaricom has blocked access to popular social media app Telegram amid the secondary school final exams in Kenya.
• This is the second year in a row that Telegram has been blocked during exams, likely in a bid to limit cheating.
• Kenya lost $4.2 million every day Telegram was blocked in November 2023 as many businesses use the app to operate.

Popular chat platform Telegram has been blocked from being accessed in Kenya in efforts to avoid cheating during the country’s end-year examinations, internet rights watchdog Netblocks has said.

According to Netblocks, Safaricom – which essentially dominates Kenya’s telecom space – has blocked access to Telegram. The app enjoys enormous popularity, with over 52 percent of the smartphone-enabled population having the chat platform installed according to data from 2022.

A Russian-made platform, Telegram has over 800 million daily active users worldwide and has a reputation for being home to criminals and ne’er-do-wells due to its encryption and lax moderation policies – a reputation that has cost its owner in recent months.

This is the second time Kenya has blocked access to the social media platform during exams, having done so in November 2023 as well.

Because a significant portion of the population of Kenya uses Telegram not only to communicate but to run their businesses, this recent block of the platform in the East African country bodes ill for the struggling economy of the nation.

In 2023, Kenya’s economy missed out on $27.02 million in revenues because of the downtime Telegram experienced that month. Business Daily Kenya estimates that every day that the social media was blocked cost local businesses $4.2 million.

Just like in 2023, the Kenyan government nor Safaricom have officially acknowledged the blockage of the social media app this year. Safaricom was also implicit in widespread internet blackouts during the riots that gripped Kenyan cities in June as young Kenyans took to the streets to protest the government’s incoming widespread tax increases.

Safaricom blamed the blackout on “an outage on two of our under sea cables that deliver internet traffic in and out of the country.”

[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]