10 November

If you message friends or colleagues in Myanmar on Signal, Freedom House's 2025 report says authorities there blocked Signal and major VPNs (services that route your connection through another server, often to get around blocking) in June and July 2024, before the military adopted a Cybersecurity Law in January 2025. Under an unofficial English translation, the law requires ministry permission to set up or provide a VPN; RFA reported it as penalising unauthorised provision, while Access Now said it also criminalises use. According to the press freedom group RSF, a blogger who ran internet cafés in Yangon was arrested with a video banned by the military government, and on 10 November 2008 a special court inside Yangon's Insein Prison sentenced him to 20 years and six months. CPJ, another press freedom group, recorded that the trial was held behind closed doors and that 15 years of the sentence came under the "Electronic Act", and he was freed in an amnesty in January 2012. In website connection tests run in Myanmar by the censorship measurement project OONI from July to September 2026, about 27,000 to 39,000 results a month were flagged as anomalous (an anomaly is not a confirmed block), and you can look up local connectivity on OONI Explorer.