Infrastructure shutdowns

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Infrastructure shutdowns are cases in which a government or a company cuts off a service that people and organisations depend on, such as internet access, payments, bank deposits or app distribution. Well-known cases include Egypt's internet shutdown of January 2011, the payment companies' blockade of WikiLeaks from December 2010, the Cyprus bail-in of 2013 and Apple's brief removal of Telegram from its App Store in August 2026.

The basics

Each of the four cases involves a different kind of service. In Egypt the internet providers withdrew their networks from the internet. In the WikiLeaks case payment companies closed accounts or suspended payments under their own policies. In Cyprus the banks closed and large deposits were converted into shares or held back. In the Telegram case an app store delisted an app.

A shutdown is a different lever from Compelled disclosure, in which the operator is ordered to hand over data. In a shutdown the operator, or the state, switches the service off.

How it applies to Logos

Logos uses these cases to argue that "A parallel society on borrowed infrastructure is a tenant". Money, records and conversations, it says, sit with banks, servers and platforms owned by others, and "Nobody has to seize any of it. They only have to switch it off." On this view a parallel institution built on infrastructure owned by others can be evicted once it starts to work.

LAN, the Logos movement's zine, makes a similar argument from history. Its first issue says the parallel societies that came before ran on infrastructure their opponents controlled, so presses were seized, meeting rooms bugged and organisers cut off from their money. Its second issue opens its section on parallel infrastructure with the claim that every parallel institution must run on sovereign infrastructure, which nobody can corrupt, switch off or seize.

It presents the Logos stack, made up of Logos Blockchain, Logos Storage and Logos Messaging, as the alternative. In its account the stack runs as networks of independent machines all over the world, so there is no company to order and no switch to pull. Logos describes Basecamp as a local-first launcher for peer-to-peer apps built on Logos, one that keeps keys, data and activity on the user's own machine.

Responses built on the stack

Logos documentation, LAN, the ΛPrize and project READMEs describe tools meant to answer several of these kinds of shutdown.

  • App distribution. Basecamp can download its own apps from the Logos Storage network as well as over HTTPS, and a Logos only setting limits downloads to Logos Storage. An earlier Logos article, on Basecamp in Testnet v0.2, noted the limits at the time. Basecamp itself was a binary off a release page, and on testnet the first hop was bootstrap infrastructure that the project ran. Backpack takes the same approach to Android, keeping app repositories in Logos Storage.
  • Broadcasting. LAN Issue 1 places Booth, a Basecamp radio station that announces its streams over Logos Messaging, in the line of pirate radio. It argues that with no platform and no directory server behind Booth, there is nobody to shut down. See Issue 1/Radio Basecamp.
  • Publishing. The ΛPrize specification behind Whistleblower starts from the premise that whistleblowers, journalists and activists need document publication that survives takedowns. The tool stores a document on Logos Storage, announces it over Logos Messaging and can record it on the Logos Execution Zone (LEZ). LAN Issue 1 reported it finished in July 2026. See Issue 1/Batteries Included.
  • Joining. Since Testnet v0.3 new participants can earn testnet tokens through computational work, a mechanism Logos calls EmPoWering. Logos says it removes the link to a centralised on-ramp or platform.

An early-draft page of the Logos documentation also describes an optional freeze authority for programs on the LEZ. A program that includes it can be paused as a whole, or can block sanctioned or compromised accounts.

Examples

Egypt, January 2011

Protests in Egypt began on 25 January 2011. At 22:34 UTC on 27 January (00:34 on 28 January in Cairo), the network monitoring firm Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks. It counted about 3,500 withdrawn BGP routes, the announcements that tell the rest of the internet how to reach a network. The four largest providers affected were Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr. The Committee to Protect Journalists, citing BGPMon data, reported that Egypt went from 2,903 networks connected to the internet over 52 providers to 327 networks over 26.

The OECD estimated that the shutdown, which covered internet and communications services for five days, had direct costs of at least USD 90 million.

WikiLeaks, December 2010

In December 2010 several payment companies stopped handling donations to WikiLeaks, which had been publishing US diplomatic cables. PayPal cut off its account, saying WikiLeaks had violated its acceptable use policy. A PayPal spokesman told Bloomberg that the company had not been contacted by any government agency and had acted on its own. MasterCard followed, and on 7 December Visa Europe suspended payments pending further investigation. On 18 December Bank of America said WikiLeaks might be engaged in activities inconsistent with its internal policies for processing payments.

In January 2011 the US Treasury said it did not have evidence that WikiLeaks met its criteria for sanctions. In October 2011 Julian Assange said the blockade had destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks' funding, and WikiLeaks stopped publishing for a time to raise money. In April 2013 the Supreme Court of Iceland ruled that the blockade imposed by Valitor, the local Visa partner, was illegal.

Cyprus, March 2013

In March 2013 Cyprus closed its banks during a financial crisis. They reopened on 28 March after a 12-day lockdown that Radio New Zealand called unprecedented, with daily withdrawals limited to €300 and most transfers abroad prohibited.

The rescue was agreed with the Eurogroup, with financial assistance of up to €10 billion. Deposits under €100,000 were fully protected, while at the two largest banks deposits above that limit were frozen and bailed in. Laiki was resolved and its uninsured deposits were moved into a legacy unit. A Yale case study reports that Laiki's uninsured depositors ultimately received 6 cents on the euro. At the Bank of Cyprus, 47.5% of uninsured deposits over €100,000 were converted into shares, a figure the government announced on 29 July 2013.

Telegram, August 2026

In early August 2026 Apple briefly removed Telegram from its App Store, saying its review had found content that broke its rules against child sexual abuse material. By Apple's account, it restored the app after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it. Users who had already downloaded the app, it added, were not affected.

Telegram's chief executive, Pavel Durov, said Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting the company. In his account an attacker had "inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat". He also said extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it to Apple. According to Durov, Telegram was restored within hours.

See also

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Sources

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