On a recent morning just after dawn, Abdeldjalil Bachar Bong, a digital rights advocate based in Chad, finished an early morning Islamic prayer and reflexively opened up his phone to check for updates. But he couldn’t get online — his phone wouldn’t connect to the internet and WhatsApp wasn’t showing any new messages. Perturbed, Bachar Bong asked his neighbor if he could get on the web, but he, too, said that he could not. The internet had gone dark.

The root of the digital disruption was a deadly raid at the home of a candidate running against President Idriss Déby Itno, who has been in power since 1990. After the attack in February, in which the candidate’s mother and several relatives reportedly died, the country’s internet and messaging services abruptly cut out. 

Bachar Bong said the shutdown lasted three days. During that time, he was unable to get online for work or communicate with family. In desperation, some people traveled to the border of Chad and Cameroon to try to gain access to Cameroon’s digital infrastructure, Bachar Bong said. He likened the sensation of living in digital darkness to losing one’s eyesight. “You can see nothing because you have no communication,” he said. “It was very difficult. We cannot live without internet as we cannot live without water today.”

In a few days, however, Bachar Bong worries Chadians could find themselves in online darkness once again. He and other digital rights campaigners are nervously eyeing upcoming presidential elections in Chad and Benin on April 11. The two countries both have histories of internet disruptions, in a region where blackouts are becoming a common tool for governments to suppress dissent and the free flow of information during elections, protests and periods of political unrest.