Claim: Several social media posts claim a military coup has occurred in the Ivory Coast, and internet access has been curtailed in the country.
Verdict: False! DUBAWA’s sources in Ivory Coast have confirmed that as of Wednesday, May 21, 2025, no military coup has occurred and internet service remains active in the country.
Full Text
Several random reports on social media claim that a military coup has taken place in Ivory Coast, and internet access has been cut for most residents.
The viral claim, including some shared on X (formerly Twitter) here and here, is being supported with videos of fire razing a building and street protests.
Many of the Facebook posts sighted by DUBAWA are from pages managed from countries other than the Ivory Coast, such as this page from Ghana and Nigeria, raising questions about the authenticity of the claims.
Verification
DUBAWA accessed screenshots from the videos in some of the claims to verify the claim and ran them through a series of Google reverse image searches. The results showed that videos supposedly showing the occurrence of a military coup in Ivory Coast were from unrelated events.
For instance, the image below, taken from one of the videos in the viral claim, was confirmed from a fire incident at the Adjamé Château commercial centre in February 2025.
Various news reports, such as this and this, and a YouTube video reported on the fire incident.
On Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at 5:38 pm (GMT), Air Jeannin, an Abidjan journalist, told DUBAWA that no military coup had occurred in Ivory Coast.
“I have heard of it [rumours online] but I was at the presidential palace a minute ago and I didn’t see any tanks,” she said.
Based on data from the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, DUBAWA determined that there was no internet shutdown in the Ivory Coast during the alleged military coup. The data shows that at least between May 1, 2025, and May 21, 2025, internet service remained active in the Ivory Coast.
Information from SurfShark’s internet shutdown tracker also indicates that no internet shutdown incident has been recorded in Ivory Coast.
Conclusion
No credible information supports the claim that a military coup has occurred in the Ivory Coast. Videos used to justify the claim are from past unrelated events.
Source: Dubawa Ghana