Following last week's demonstrations, Kenya erupted in protest this week against a new finance bill seen as exacerbating economic hardship.
The demonstrations, which have registered at least 13 fatalities per Reuters as police opened fire on protestors on Tuesday, were accompanied by a nationwide internet disruption, and a human rights group documented alleged abductions of protestors.
Amid this turmoil, Kenya's leading telecommunications giant Safaricom finds itself at the centre of a firestorm of accusations following service outages and disappearances.
Double Disruption: Protests and the NetThe internet disruptions significantly impacted Kenya, with neighbouring countries also experiencing disruptions. The Kenyan government denied any involvement, while NetBlocks, an internet rights watchdog, pointed to the timing of the outage - coinciding with the protests - and its impact being more severe than typical subsea cable cuts, raising the possibility of unscheduled maintenance.
The outage occurred just around the moment protesters attempted to storm parliament, said Isik Mater, Director of Research at NetBlocks, in a statement to TechCrunch .
