When Indonesia Blocked PayPal and Steam

Written in 2026, looking back at the weekend Indonesia switched off PayPal and Steam, with the benefit of knowing how normal platform fragility would come to feel.

This weekend the Indonesian communications ministry started enforcing a registration rule for online platforms, and services that had not registered got blocked. Overnight, PayPal, Steam, Yahoo, Epic Games and a handful of others simply stopped working for people here. I remember the specific, slightly unreal feeling of tools I used every week going dark because of a form somebody had not filed.

The morning things just stopped

PayPal going down was the one that actually hurt, and not in an abstract way. A lot of freelancers, agencies and small operators here move money through it, and for a stretch that money was frozen behind a policy nobody outside the ministry had fully planned around. The government eventually opened PayPal back up for a short window so people could withdraw what was stuck, which tells you they knew how many livelihoods ran through a single foreign service.

Steam and the game platforms produced a different kind of noise, louder and funnier online, but underneath it the same lesson. Whole communities, whole small businesses selling in-game items, woke up locked out of the thing their week was built on, with no say and no warning that landed in time.

The uncomfortable question underneath

I do not want to argue the policy here. What it did to my head was force a question I had been comfortably avoiding: how much of what I do sits on top of a platform I do not own, cannot influence, and could lose access to on a Monday for reasons that have nothing to do with me.

The honest answer was: almost all of it. Payments, analytics, ad platforms, the search engine that half my job depends on, the social apps where discovery actually happens. I had quietly assumed all of that was permanent infrastructure, like the road outside. This weekend was a reminder that it is more like a tenancy, and the landlord has other tenants and other priorities.

What I took from it

Two things stuck. The first is that platform risk in a market like this is not a tail scenario you file under “unlikely.” It is a normal weather event. Regulators act, foreign services deprioritise smaller markets, a rule gets enforced with days of notice, and suddenly your stack has a hole in it. Building as if that will never happen is just choosing not to look.

The second is quieter. The businesses that came through the weekend best were the ones that had more than one way to reach their people and more than one way to get paid. Not because they were clever about this specific rule, but because they never let a single platform become the only door. That is not a dramatic strategy. It is closer to keeping cash in more than one place, boring, unglamorous, and the thing you are grateful for on the exact weekend the door you relied on is locked.