By Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent
With YouTube and Twitter blocked - and many other sites apparently choked - you might have thought the internet's favourite animal would be hard to come across in Turkey.
On Tuesday, energy minister Taner Yildiz came to the rescue.
He blamed the power cuts that affected Ankara on Sunday's local elections on a cat.
"I'm not joking, my friends," he said. "A cat entered a power distribution unit.
"It was the cause of the blackout and it's not the first time that it has happened. It is wrong to link it with the elections. It's wrong to cry foul play."
No word on what happened to the unfortunate and presumably electrocuted cat.
AKP cat (the party of government) and CHP cat (party of opposition) Mr Yildiz's comments were manna to Twitter, with users posting and sharing various pictures of cats, in the time-honoured tradition of the internet.
Soon, the hashtag "catlobby" - referring to the mysterious feline cabal meddling in Turkish affairs - started trending.
Just some fun, right?
Actually, cats have a proud place in the tradition of online protest.
When digital activists in the US wanted to protest The Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012, their protest song was called The Day The Lolcats Died.
Translation: Did you enter the substation? Lolcats are images of cats accompanied by humorous text.
Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Civic Media Centre, coined the cute cat theory of digital activism.
The idea is that most people are not interested in using the web for activism, but they are interested in using the web for more facile activities, like looking at pictures of cute cats.
The tools used to share those pictures of cats - in Turkey's case, Twitter - are also useful to activists.
And when a government shuts down these tools - as Turkey has shut down Twitter and YouTube - this leads to outrage among the general population, who can no longer look at pictures of cats.
As Mr Zuckerman puts it: "Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites.
Loss of access to the pictures can highlight censorship "Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents."
The situation in Turkey is a twist on this: people were previously using Twitter for activism, and still are.
The reason Erdogan shut the site down was because of leaked audio files purporting to show corruption in his administration.
Now they're using it for lolcats. As Mr Zuckerman described it to me: "It's a cute development in a complicated story."
Lolcats are part of a very serious political situation in Turkey, much of which is playing out online.
They're also hard to get right.
Mr Zuckerman said: "There's a real challenge within the world of lolcats - making activism viral probably means making it funny as well as political and heart-wrenching."
Lolcats mean more than just the lols.
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