Residents of Fizi territory and the city of Baraka in South Kivu province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are suffering severe socio-economic distress following a near four-month shutdown of mobile telecommunications and internet services.<\/p>\n
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The prolonged network blackout, which was enforced by authorities in early July, has severely crippled local businesses, halted mobile financial transfers, and disrupted daily life for hundreds of thousands of citizens.<\/p>\n
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Reporting from the region, independent journalist Mihali Kordontch highlighted the extensive damage caused by the communications isolation:<\/p>\n
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“Life in Fizi and Baraka has become increasingly challenging as residents find themselves effectively cut off from the rest of the country and the wider world. The communications blackout has dealt a heavy blow to the local economy, hitting small business owners and traders who rely heavily on mobile money transactions and digital banking.<\/p>\n
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Public services and humanitarian operations have also been severely impacted. Local residents are forced to travel vast distances simply to find a working signal, while civil society organisations continue to urge authorities to restore network access immediately to alleviate the growing socio-economic strain.”<\/p>\n
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Despite brief intermittent attempts to restore partial network access in recent weeks, service remains unstable, leaving the local population in continued uncertainty.<\/p>\n
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–ChannelAfrica–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":49877,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-49876","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Telecommunications outage in DRC disrupts public services and humanitarian operations","published_date":"2026-11-03 16:21:39","news_description":"Telecommunications outage in DRC disrupts public services and humanitarian operations","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/49876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/49876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49880,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/49876\/revisions\/49880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=49876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}