The Washington Post reported that five Taliban websites in Pashto and Dari, Arabic, Urdu and English were taken offline.
It is not known who the actors were that shut down these sites.
Social media and websites have been vital communication tools for Taliban and other extremist groups in South Asia and the Middle East.
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The Washington Post reported that several Taliban websites and WhatsApp groups went down on Friday.
Five Taliban websites that were operated in Pashto and Dari, Arabic, Urdu and English went offline, according to the Post.
The security of five websites is managed by Cloudflare, a web security and infrastructure company. Public records show that this information is available. Cloudflare previously made similar efforts in order to reduce services to extremist organisations online. In 2017, Cloudflare removed its protection for Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer and 8chan online message forum.
Cloudflare did not respond to a request for clarification on whether or not it had taken down security at the five sites, nor if it is managing security during outages.
SITE Intelligence Group (a US NGO that monitors internet extremist activity) reported that several Taliban WhatsApp groups were also offline. Facebook, which is the owner of WhatsApp's encrypted messaging platform, has taken steps to remove Taliban presence from its platform. However, last week saw a double in followers. YouTube and Twitter are also working together to ban the Taliban from their platforms, although their guidelines are unclear and there are still several Taliban spokespersons active on Twitter.
Alison Bonny, a WhatsApp spokesperson, stated that they are obligated to follow U.S. sanctions laws. "This includes banning accounts which appear to be official accounts of Taliban. Given the changing situation in Afghanistan, we are seeking additional information from U.S. authorities.
WhatsApp did not comment on Friday whether the Taliban WhatsApp groups had been taken down by WhatsApp.
These outages occurred after the Taliban overtook US-trained Afghan forces within the last few weeks. They retook control of Afghanistan's government 20 years ago, after being ousted by the US and its allied countries during the US "war against terror."
As watchdog groups, politicians, and social media users continue their alarm about extremist movements online, the website and social media outages are occurring. Social media and online communications by the Taliban remain one of its most powerful communication and propaganda tools to coordinate its people both locally and internationally.
The US considers the Taliban to be a terrorist foreign organization that has committed violence and many human rights violations. The Associated Press reported that the US federal agencies in Afghanistan launched an online scrubbing campaign earlier this week to delete information about Afghan civilian contacts who had cooperated with the US government. They now face possible Taliban retribution. These efforts are not directly related to Friday's shutdown of WhatsApp and the website.
