KHARTOUM — The internet service in Sudan has not yet been restored, despite a judicial ruling on Tuesday requiring the communication companies to immediately resume the service, which has been blocked since Oct. 25.
Sudanese economic experts and analysts believe that the internet outage for more than two weeks has negatively effects on the economic and social conditions in the country. “The banking sector is the most affected sector by the outage of internet services,” Mohamed Mustafa Ishag, a Sudanese banking expert, told Xinhua. “Those dealing with Sudanese banks suffer from inability to manage their accounts and daily transactions,” he said, adding that “many banking transactions requiring dealing via the internet have been disrupted, and most of those transactions are made through liquid money (cash).”
Ali Ismail, a Sudanese economic analyst, pointed to the negative impact of cutting the internet service on the communications companies themselves. “Certainly, the communications companies themselves have sustained great losses, especially if we know that the size of their daily business is estimated at about 6 million U.S. dollars,” Ismail told Xinhua. Other sectors have also been affected by the internet outage, such as transportation. “A broad sector of the population of the capital Khartoum suffers from inability to deal with the ‘Tirhal’ application for transportation due to the outage of internet in mobile phones,” he said.
Essam Al-Zein, director of an import and export company in Khartoum, said that it is difficult to work in light of the outage of internet. “Our business has been greatly affected, and there is a significant decline in the movement of export and import due to the lack of internet,” Al-Zain told Xinhua. According to unofficial statistics, there are nearly 14 million internet users in Sudan, about 30 percent of the country’s population of 44 million people.The internet service was blocked on Oct. 25 following measures adopted by the General Commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, including declaring a state of emergency and dissolving the Sovereign Council and the government.
