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With over 60,000 subscribers on Telegram and close to 20,000 on Instagram, Narikbi Maksut was used to a constant flurry of notifications. When his phone went silent, he knew something had gone wrong. 

“At first I thought they had just blocked the internet, but they had literally turned it off,” said Maksut, an IT specialist in the Netherlands. “That’s when I started to panic.”

Demonstrations over a hike in fuel prices in early January started to spread across Kazakhstan, where Maksut is from. He had been live streaming on Instagram with friends at the demonstrations, staying in touch with relatives and keeping close watch as events unraveled into some of the worst bloodshed in the country’s 30 years of independence.