Originally published 2021-03-22.
In mid-March 2021, Myanmar's military placed several districts of Yangon under martial law, cut mobile internet across the country and left millions of people unable to tell the world what was happening on their streets. The blackout came at the deadliest point so far of its campaign against people protesting the February coup. Rights monitors reported that more than 250 people had been killed by the time this story first ran, with thousands more detained.
This article explains what the shutdown involved, why it alarmed human rights groups, how the military justified its crackdown, and what became of the country and its jailed leader in the years that followed.
What the blackout involved
The internet restrictions did not arrive all at once. The night before the coup, telecommunications went down as soldiers detained the elected leadership. Facebook, then the main way most people in Myanmar went online, was blocked within days, followed by Instagram and Twitter. A full nationwide outage hit on 6 February.
From 15 February, the authorities imposed a nightly internet curfew, typically from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. That was when many raids and arrests took place. On 15 March, mobile data was switched off nationwide. Fixed-line fibre connections kept working for a while, but they are expensive and reach a small fraction of homes, so for most people the phone had been their only link to the internet. Within days, wider restrictions followed.
At the same time, troops sealed off working-class townships in Yangon, the country's largest city and former capital (the official capital has been Naypyidaw since 2005). Martial law handed military commanders full administrative and judicial power in those areas, including the right to try civilians before military tribunals.
Why rights groups feared the worst
A shutdown of this kind does more than inconvenience people. It removes the main way residents document abuses and the main way journalists, aid agencies and families outside the area learn about them. Footage filmed on phones had been the strongest evidence of soldiers firing on unarmed crowds, and that flow of images slowed sharply once data was cut.
John Quinley, a senior human rights specialist at the group Fortify Rights, told CNN that people in the sealed-off districts were cut off from the outside world. "The junta is trying to stop any information about the violence they are committing from getting out," he said.
Researchers who study shutdowns make a related point: a gap in video does not mean nothing happened. When a district goes dark, the absence of footage should be read as missing evidence, not as calm.
How the coup began
On 1 February 2021, the armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, seized power in Naypyidaw. They detained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's de facto civilian leader, along with President Win Myint, cabinet ministers and members of parliament. Power passed to the commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
The generals claimed that the November 2020 general election, which Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won with 396 of 476 contested seats, had been marred by voter fraud. The election commission rejected that claim for lack of evidence. The coup ended a decade-long experiment with partial civilian rule that had begun in 2011, after nearly fifty years of military government.
The public answer was immediate. Doctors and nurses launched a Civil Disobedience Movement on 2 February, and civil servants, teachers and railway workers soon joined them in walking off the job. Crowds filled city streets, banging pots at night and raising the three-finger salute borrowed from the Hunger Games films.
The military's account and the death toll
The junta presented its use of force as a response to rioting. In a statement reported by CNN, it said that factories and public buildings had been set on fire and police stations attacked, so security forces "had to handle the situation very hard." State media blamed protesters for a wave of arson attacks on Chinese-owned factories in Yangon's Hlaing Tharyar industrial zone on 14 March. No group claimed responsibility, and many residents blamed the security forces.
What is not in dispute is the scale of the killing. On that same day, Human Rights Watch counted at least 65 protesters and bystanders killed in Hlaing Tharyar alone. Thirteen days later, on Armed Forces Day, at least 114 civilians were killed across the country, the bloodiest single day of the protests. By April the toll had passed 700, and by mid-2022 at least 2,000 civilians had died, with around 14,000 people arrested, according to figures collected by rights monitors.
Some accounts at the time attributed that statement to a pro-military news outlet. It was in fact the military's own position, set out under Min Aung Hlaing's command.
The Rohingya record
Fear of what the army might do in the dark was rooted in its past. In 2016 and again from August 2017, the military carried out what it called clearance operations against the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority in Rakhine State in the west of the country who are largely denied citizenship. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in the first month alone. More than 700,000 fled across the border into Bangladesh, where the camps around Cox's Bazar became the largest refugee settlement in the world.
A UN fact-finding mission in 2018 accused the military of crimes against humanity and genocide and called for six generals to face trial. In 2019 The Gambia brought a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, which in January 2020 ordered the country to protect the Rohingya who remained and preserve evidence. In February 2025 a court in Argentina, acting under universal jurisdiction, issued arrest warrants that included Min Aung Hlaing.
Earlier reporting sometimes placed this violence in the north of the country or claimed that the Rohingya sought an independent state. Neither is accurate: the operations took place in northern Rakhine, in the west, and the main Rohingya demand has been citizenship and safety in Myanmar.
What happened next
The crackdown did not end resistance. Many protesters fled to areas held by ethnic armed groups, and a parallel National Unity Government formed armed People's Defence Forces. The result was a multi-sided civil war. By March 2024 at least 50,000 people had been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 26,000 had been arrested. The emergency rule declared in 2021 for one year was extended again and again.
Aung San Suu Kyi was tried in closed courts on a long list of charges, including corruption, election fraud and breaching the official secrets act. A final verdict on 30 December 2022 brought her combined sentence to 33 years, which was later cut to 27 years by a partial pardon. In 2026 her remaining sentence was reduced again and commuted to house arrest, and former president Win Myint was released under an amnesty in April 2026. The UN, the United States and most European governments condemned the trials as politically motivated.
The internet shutdowns also became a template. Myanmar has since used regional blackouts repeatedly in areas where fighting is heavy, and digital rights groups now count it among the countries that cut connectivity most often.
How to read news from a blackout zone
Stories from places where the internet has been cut are hard to report and easy to misread. A few habits help:
- Treat early casualty figures as a floor, not a ceiling. Counts from monitoring groups usually rise as people regain contact.
- Look for named sources and dated statements, and be wary of undated videos that may come from earlier events.
- Remember that official statements from a government that controls the network are also claims, not neutral facts.
- Silence from an area is information in itself. It often means people cannot speak, not that there is nothing to report.
Myanmar's spring of 2021 showed both how much can be hidden when a state controls the switch and how much still gets out through determined residents, reporters and rights groups.
Sources: CNN, 17 March 2021 (Quinley and military statement); Wikipedia: 2021 Myanmar coup d'état; Wikipedia: 2021 Myanmar protests; Wikipedia: Internet in Myanmar; Wikipedia: Aung San Suu Kyi; Wikipedia: Rohingya genocide.
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