In large parts of the country, the president of Kazakhstan has declared a state of emergency, as authorities struggled to respond to a rare outbreak of unrest.
The protests began over the weekend in the west of the country and have spread quickly, due to rising fuel prices.
Video footage from Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, showed lines of riot police and numerous crowd control vehicles massed in the centre of the city on Tuesday evening.
More than 5,000 people were present, according to the police, who used stun grenades and teargas after crowds refused to disperse. There were unverified reports of police cars on fire in Almaty, and videos from a number of cities appeared to show protesters braving subzero temperatures and a large presence of security forces.
The mobile internet was down and messaging apps were blocked across large parts of the authoritarian Central Asian nation.
The president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, said in a video address on Tuesday that all calls to storm or attack government buildings are absolutely illegal.
In a tweet, Tokayev blamed the protests on destructive individuals who want to undermine the stability and unity of our society in an attempt to quell the unrest, but he said the government would meet on Wednesday to discuss the socio-economic demands of protesters.
He has imposed a state of emergency covering Almaty and the western Mangystau province, which is due to last for two weeks.
The protests began over the weekend in the oil city of Zhanaozen, the same place where police fired on protesters killing at least 16 people in December 2011.
The price of liquefied petroleum gas LPG used by many to power their cars, particularly in the west of Kazakhstan, was the initial cause of outrage. The price doubled in a matter of days.
Tokayev said the government would introduce a price cap of 50 tenge about 8 p a liter on LPG, about half of the current market price in Mangystau province.
In some places the protests have taken a more political hue, with a release of pent-up frustration about lack of accountability in the authoritarian country.
Tokayev is the handpicked successor of Nursultan Nazarbayev, a Soviet-era Communist boss who became Kazakhstan's first leader after independence and ruled for nearly three decades until he stepped down in 2019. The 81-year-old still wields enormous power behind the scenes, and the country's capital city was renamed Nur-Sultan in his honour in 2019.
Under Nazarbayev and his successor, a small elite has amassed enormous wealth, while life for many ordinary Kazakhs is still hard-going, particularly in the resource-rich west of the country. Rare protests have been ruthlessly crushed, and the regime faces no real opposition in parliament.