You Planned Everything Except the Internet, and That's the Part That Will Get You

Key Takeaways

• Global internet freedom has been declining for 15 consecutive years, with conditions worsening in 28 of the 72 countries assessed in Freedom House's 2025 report.
• Access Now documented at least 313 internet shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, more than any prior year on record, with not a single day passing without at least one shutdown somewhere in the world.
• Apps that travelers rely on daily, including WhatsApp, Google services, Instagram, and navigation tools, are blocked or restricted in dozens of countries.
• Buying a local SIM in many countries legally links your identity to your activity, and arriving at certain borders with certain apps on your device creates a risk.

Most travelers run some version of the same checklist. Flights, accommodation, currency, charger adapters, travel insurance, and passports. Maybe a quick look at local SIM card pricing. What almost nobody checks is whether the internet at their destination is the same internet they use at home.

The apps that you rely on daily, whether for navigation, communication, payments, work, or just scrolling, may be blocked, throttled, subject to sudden shutdown, or technically available but monitored in ways that change what's sensible to open. This has become a reality for hundreds of millions of people in dozens of countries, and it catches travelers off guard more than almost any other logistical misstep.

The Internet Is Not the Same Everywhere, Not Even Close

Freedom House's annual Internet Freedom Report reviews 72 countries and found that conditions deteriorated in 28 of them during the coverage period. This was not an outlier year. Global internet freedom has been steadily declining for 15 consecutive years, with China and Myanmar ranking among the worst in the world.

The controls vary by country, but the categories Freedom House tracks include, but are not limited to, throttling of international connections, blocking of specific online platforms, legal penalties for online expression, surveillance of private communications, and mandatory identity verification for internet access. No single country uses all of them, but most use more than one.

What this means, practically, is that your experience of the internet is shaped by geography in ways that have nothing to do with your device, your internet provider, or your Wi-Fi password. You can have full bars in a hotel room in Tehran or Beijing and still be unable to load a search result, send a message on your favorite app, or reach most of the web you're used to browsing.

Shutdowns Are Not the Exception

The Access Now #KeepItOn 2025 annual report is the most comprehensive global database of intentional internet shutdowns, and their 2025 numbers are the worst on record. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented at least 313 shutdowns in 52 countries, up from 304 in 2024 and 289 in 2023. Seven new countries joined the offender list, meaning people in 100 countries have now experienced a documented shutdown since tracking began in 2016.

Not a single day of 2025 passed without at least one shutdown somewhere in the world.

For the third year in a row, conflict was the leading trigger, accounting for 125 shutdowns across 14 countries, which was 40% of the global total. But shutdowns also occurred during elections, exam seasons, and street protests. Which means the timing of a trip can intersect with shutdown risk in ways most travelers would never think to check.

Some of those shutdowns aren't temporary. As of publication, 75 shutdowns across 33 countries had carried over from 2025 into 2026, with several representing indefinite platform blocks rather than emergency disruptions. Some of these have been running for years.

I'd also note that "shutdown" covers a broad spectrum. A full national blackout is the extreme end. More common are targeted platform blocks, like WhatsApp cut during a political crisis, Instagram throttled before an election, or international news sites returning timeouts with no explanation. The kind of disruption that looks, from the outside, like a bad connection.

What Actually Gets Blocked, and Where

The most frequently blocked platforms globally include WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, and Google services. China's restrictions on Google and most Western social platforms are well-documented, but the list extends far beyond China. Russia has blocked, throttled, or legally restricted hundreds of online services. Iran blocks most Western communication tools. Even countries with generally open internet environments have imposed targeted blocks during protests or elections.

Navigation and translation apps are affected too, which matters for a traveler in a way it doesn't for a resident with alternatives already established.

There's also a layer of risk that has nothing to do with what's blocked. In many countries, purchasing a local SIM card legally requires identity registration. Privacy International has tracked the global expansion of SIM registration laws across dozens of countries, and the practical result for a traveler is that using local data links your verified identity to everything you do online while connected to that SIM. 

The risk window can also start before you cross the border. The EFF's documentation on border device searches covers how authorities in multiple countries can inspect phones and laptops at entry points, including reviewing apps, browsing history, and message contents, without the legal threshold required for a formal investigation. Arriving with certain apps, certain accounts logged in, or certain content cached on your device can create problems entirely separate from anything you do during the trip.

The Practical Pre-Trip Internet Check

None of this requires specialized knowledge to prepare for. It requires one research step that most people skip.

Before any trip, look up the destination country in Freedom House's Freedom on the Net annual index. The country-level scores give you an overall picture of the environment. For specific platform availability, OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference) publishes real-time measurement data showing which services are blocked in which countries.

Then reflect on what apps or services you actually depend on. Navigation apps, messaging platforms, work tools, banking apps, streaming services. For each one, look into whether it's likely to be available and what the fallback is if it’s not.

In countries that use content-level blocking rather than full network shutdowns, a VPN restores access to blocked platforms. The Freedom House Tunnel Vision report documents how VPNs and end-to-end encryption remain key tools for maintaining open access under censorship, and why censorship regimes continue trying to block them. One factor worth knowing before you travel is that many censorship-heavy countries use deep packet inspection to detect and block datacenter VPN servers specifically. Residential IP addresses, the kind Mysterium VPN routes traffic through, sourced from real home connections worldwide, are substantially harder to detect and block than the standard datacenter addresses most VPN providers use.

Ultimately, how effective any given workaround will be depends on the specific country and what's in place when you arrive. But if you're heading somewhere with documented internet restrictions, setting up a virtual private network before you leave is the move. You can now get Mysterium VPN at 78% off!

Should we really need a privacy tool to do the basic things we expect the internet to do? No. But the internet a lot of people are flying into doesn't share that expectation.

There's also a preparation step that's easy to overlook. If you know you're heading somewhere with significant restrictions, log out of sensitive accounts, back up important data, and consider what's stored on your device before you arrive. The CPJ's Digital Safety Kit was written for journalists but applies to anyone crossing into a country with a documented pattern of device inspection. The risk level varies widely, but knowing what's possible is the point of checking.

Where to Go From Here

The gap between the internet travelers expect, and the internet many destinations actually provide has been widening for 15 years. The 2025 data from both Access Now and Freedom House show no sign of its reversal. What travelers call "bad Wi-Fi" is sometimes actually a bad connection, and sometimes it's a deliberate infrastructure decision made by a government they've never thought about.

The same logic that makes people research visa requirements, vaccination records, or safety ratings should apply to internet access. It's part of the destination, and in 2026, it's the part that's changed the most.