Raphael Satter reports:
Somali reporter Abdalle Ahmed Mumin was doubly distressed when he heard that a colleague had been abducted by masked gunmen at the University of Mogadishu on the morning of Aug. 17.
A fellow journalist was missing and Mumin – the chairman of the Somali Journalists Syndicate – had little way of getting the word out. Digital sabotage had knocked his syndicate’s website and email accounts offline a few days earlier.
“I can still feel the frustration,” Mumin told Reuters. “Our link to the outside world, to the international media, is our website.”
It was only after getting help from Qurium, a Swedish nonprofit that does digital defense work for news organizations and nonprofits, that Mumin was able to get his site back on its feet and properly raise the alarm about the missing reporter.
When Qurium investigated, it eventually traced a source of the outage to a surprising place: Wyoming.
Read more at Reuters.