Ethnic conflict and economic despair have continually destabilized the DRC since long before Google existed. The 100-day slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus carried out by Hutu extremists during the 1994 Rwandan genocide led Rwanda to invade neighboring Zaire (present-day DRC) in 1996. This triggered the First Congo War and hundreds of thousands of deaths more as Rwanda and its coalition sought to kill any remaining perpetrators of the genocide who may have fled to Zaire.

While the First Congo War brought a new government and the renaming of Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, the deep-rooted tension that remained would soon erupt into the Second Congo War, considered by some to be World War III. From 1998 to 2008, 5.4 million people died. Ndizeye made it out alive in 2003, the year the war formally ended (though the casualties did not).