Al Jazeera's Ethiopia bureau chief, Mohammed Taha Tawakel, describes a region of between six and seven million people living with electricity cuts, internet blackouts and a total lack of communications.
AFP puts it more narrowly, and from its own position: claims coming out of the region cannot be independently verified, "with media prevented from travelling to affected areas and significant communications disruptions".
A political source in Tigray told Mada Masr the communications were cut around 25 September. Two days later, the Tigray TV building in Mekelle was hit by a drone, which stopped its broadcast. AFP states the same thing in the caption of a photograph it published with its own report.
The one source speaking on the record
Almost every account of this blackout is anonymous. One is not.
Tesfaselassie Medhin, the Eparch of Adigrat, has appealed publicly for humanitarian access, warning that the Church and local communities have been cut off from the outside world. "We are completely isolated, communications are blocked, and we have no contact with anyone," he said in a message to the Fides news agency.
His message had to be carried out with United Nations assistance to reach a news agency at all. That detail is its own evidence of the thing he is describing.
Adigrat is in eastern Tigray, well away from Mekelle and from the southern front. None of the other accounts we hold covers that part of the region.
Why this is the most important story on this site
When a region of six to seven million people cannot be reached by phone or internet, the only accounts that escape are from people with a reason to shape them.
That is not a hypothetical. In the same week, a pro-government commander announced on social media that Tigray's forces had been "wiped out" and that he was close to controlling the whole region. Al Jazeera said it could not verify the claim. Its own bureau chief then noted, in the same article, that the TPLF still holds several towns.
Both sides are making claims nobody outside can check. That is a predictable consequence of a blackout, not a coincidence.
So when you read a caveat on this site — and you will read a lot of them — this is usually why. It is not excessive caution. It is six million people we cannot call.