When Governments Switch Off Your Business

A year ago, Nepal went through something most founders never expect to experience: the government ordered internet providers to block 26 social media platforms in a single night. Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, X, Instagram. Gone, overnight.

It is not just a Nepal story. Turkey has made throttling social platforms during political events routine enough that VPN guides now treat it as a normal feature of life there. In September 2026, an Istanbul court shut down the independent news site T24 and its social media accounts entirely. The playbook keeps spreading: when leaders face pressure, the off switch for the country’s conversation is one of the first things they reach for.

If that gives you a strange feeling, you are probably Nepali. We lived the full version of this story last September.

What happened in Nepal last September

In September 2025, the Nepal government ordered internet providers to block 26 social media platforms that had not registered under the country’s Social Media Directives 2080. The list was long: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, X, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, and more. Only a handful of apps, including TikTok and Viber, had completed the registration in time.

Overnight, the apps millions of Nepalis used for work, school, and family went dark.

I watched small businesses lose their storefronts in a single night. The tailor in Kathmandu who takes all her orders on WhatsApp. The restaurant that confirms bookings through Messenger. The online seller whose entire customer base lives inside a Facebook group. The freelancer whose clients only know how to reach him on Instagram. None of them had done anything wrong. Their businesses were simply located on land they did not own.

The protests that followed were led by young Nepalis and they turned violent. At least 19 people died and hundreds were injured. The government lifted the ban within days. But the lesson stayed with every founder who lived through it.

This is not a Nepal story

The pattern is the same in every country: block the apps, slow the network, control the story. Turkey’s restrictions around protests have come in bursts over the years, each lasting hours or days. Elsewhere, the targets shift but the tool stays the same. Platform restrictions are becoming a standard government tool, not an exception.

You do not have to be in politics for this to hit you. You only have to run a business that depends on those apps.

The uncomfortable truth about rented land

Here is the sentence I keep coming back to: if your business can be switched off by someone else’s decision, you do not fully own your business. You own a permission.

WhatsApp Business accounts, Facebook pages, Instagram shops, TikTok followings. These are powerful tools. I use them. You should use them. But they are rented land. The rent is not money. The rent is control. The landlord can change the terms, raise the price, or bulldoze the building with zero notice, and there is nothing in your contract that stops them, because there is no real contract. There are only terms of service written by the other side.

Nepal’s ban made this abstract idea concrete for an entire country at once. One government letter to the telecom authority, and the most popular communication tools in the nation stopped working. There was no hearing for the shop owners. No migration plan. No compensation. Just darkness, and then a week of chaos figuring out how to reach customers.

What I changed after the ban

The ban changed how I build. Niguro already runs on infrastructure we control, a self-hosted WordPress stack on our own servers, a decision I wrote more about when I introduced Niguro. But living through the blackout pushed me further. Here is what I now tell every founder friend, and what I practice myself.

Own your domain and your website. Your website is the one piece of the internet that is truly yours. A government letter to a foreign company cannot take down a site you host yourself. An algorithm change cannot hide it from your customers. If your entire business lives inside someone else’s app, you are one policy decision away from starting over. Your website is your home. Everything else is a channel.

Own your customer list. Every customer relationship that exists only inside WhatsApp chats or Instagram DMs is a relationship you cannot reach if the app disappears. Keep names, emails, and phone numbers in your own database. An email list is the oldest, most boring technology on the internet, and it is still the one channel nobody can switch off for you. Start collecting emails this week if you have not already.

Keep a second channel ready. If WhatsApp goes down tomorrow morning, where do your customers find you? Have the answer ready before you need it. It can be as simple as an SMS broadcast list, a Telegram channel, or a banner on your own website. The founders who survived the ban week best were the ones who could say “find us here instead” on day one, not the ones who spent the week figuring it out.

Spread across platforms, but anchor on your own. Do not build your whole audience in one place. Nepal’s ban hit Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and X at the same time. Founders who had spread across platforms, plus their own site and email list, kept at least one line open to their customers. Every platform you depend on is a single point of failure. Treat it that way.

Write the backup plan while you are calm. The time to prepare for a blackout is not during the blackout. Write down, this week, exactly what you would do if your main platform disappeared for seven days. Where would you post updates? How would you take orders? How would you reach your best customers? A one page plan, written on a normal afternoon, is worth more than a week of panic.

The deeper lesson

There is a philosophy of work point hiding inside this story, and it goes beyond Nepal, beyond WhatsApp, and beyond any single government.

Founders love leverage. We build on platforms because they give us reach we could never build on our own. That leverage is real and I am not telling you to give it up. But leverage always has a direction. The platform’s leverage over you grows exactly as fast as your dependence on it. Every follower, every customer chat, every order that lives only on their servers makes the relationship more lopsided.

The healthy way to use a platform is as a channel, not a home. A channel carries your message to people. A home is where your business lives. Channels can close. Homes should not.

These stories fade from attention in a day or two. The pattern does not fade. More governments will test these switches. More platforms will comply, because they have to. The only question is whether your business even notices when it happens.

So here is my simple rule, learned the hard way last September. Build on land you own. Rent everything else, and never confuse the two.