Africa’s rural communities face the largest disparities, with mobile internet gender gaps significantly wider outside urban centres. (Image created using ChatGPT) More than 810 million women across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain offline, with Sub-Saharan Africa recording one of the world’s widest mobile internet gender gaps. According to the GSM Association’s (GSMA’s) Mobile Gender…
The world’s online population rose by more than 240 million people in 2025, bringing the total number of Internet users to six billion, according to the latest Facts and Figures 2025 report released by the International Telecommunication Union, ITU. The report shows that about three-quarters of the global population are now online, up from 5.8…
Africa was hit by a record number of digital shutdowns in 2025 that stifled opposition and undermined democracy. On 29 October 2025, election day, a nationwide internet outage cut online communication across Tanzania, raising concerns about electoral transparency. This is increasingly common across Africa. Ethiopia has one of the most extensive and systematic histories of…
Users were struggling to access the FNB app and website on Friday as Black Friday coincided with pay day for many South Africans. A presumed surge in online activity from Black Friday shopping coinciding with usual pay day activity appears to have toppled FNB’s banking app, with FNB-related complaints on incident monitoring website Downdetector spiking…
Problems at cloud infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused disruptions to online platforms across the world on Tuesday – and the problem was so bad it took down a website people use to report problems online. The issues began around 1.30pm SAST and appeared to be impacting websites across Africa, Europe and North America. Even Downdetector, a…
Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber has defended a huge increase in the fees it charges companies, including banks and telecommunications operators, to run checks against a national database for client verification. Following an initial pilot “that yielded promising results and further enhancements, home affairs will on 1 July 2025 begin…
