Government Internet Shutdowns Have Cost $17 Billion Since 2019

This Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns index tracks the the total economic impact of every major deliberate internet outage and social media shutdown around the world as it happens.

This kind of deliberate disruption is internet censorship in its most extreme form. Not only do these internet outages infringe on citizens’ digital rights but they are also acts of economic self-harm.

The live tracker below shows the total cost of internet shutdowns for the year so far. Annual reports dating back to 2019 provide detailed analysis for each year.

Use the page navigation to jump to the relevant section to see a summary of that year’s key findings and a link to the full report. You can also use the following links to jump straight to those sections:

• The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns Live Tracker 2021
• The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2020
• The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2019

From 2020 onwards, our internet shutdowns data includes additional human rights abuses perpetrated during these disruptions. We have highlighted these abuses in order to illustrate the wider context in which these incidents of extreme internet censorship take place.

How Do We Calculate The Cost of Internet Shutdowns?

We monitor every national and region-wide internet outage and social media shutdown imposed by governments around the world in order to determine the duration and extent of the restrictions. This allows us to accurately calculate the economic impact of each internet shutdown using the COST tool.

This tool was developed by internet monitoring NGO Netblocks and advocacy groups The Internet Society and CIPESA. It is based on indicators from the World Bank, ITU, Eurostat and US Census.

In both our Cost of Internet Shutdowns live tracker and annual reports, we include social media shutdowns, internet blackouts and severe ISP throttling in our calculations. These types of disruption to normal internet access are defined as follows:

• Internet blackouts: where internet access is completely cut off by the government. This extreme measure cannot be directly circumvented.
• Social media shutdowns: where access to popular social media, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter has been blocked. These can typically be circumvented by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
• Severe throttling: where speeds have been reduced to 2G, which permits the use of SMS and voice calls only. This is an internet blackout in all but name.

Why Are We Tracking The Cost of Internet Shutdowns?

We are fiercely opposed to internet censorship and governments withholding access to the internet as a form of social control.

Our goal in doing this work is to keep public attention focused on just how damaging internet shutdowns truly are. This damage is both direct, in terms of the economic and human cost, and indirect, in that it forces people to use unsafe VPNs to try to circumvent the restrictions imposed upon them.

We are also investigating the companies that provide the technology that make shutdowns possible, such as DNS filtering.

See our live tracker of VPN demand surges around the world

Government internet outages typically take the form of total internet blackouts or social media blocks. Another censorship tactic is internet throttling, where internet speeds are restricted so severely that anything beyond simple text-based communication becomes impossible, such as live-streaming video of protests or human rights abuses.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a number of methods to implement what governments demand of them when they want to restrict internet access in this way. Some of the most common are below.

It’s not possible to bypass a full internet blackout and actually get online in any normal way, however there are still countermeasures available to avoid becoming completely isolated.

Fortunately social media shutdowns and other online content blocks are far more common forms of internet censorship and can be circumvented using the right tools.

On the anniversary of the start of the Kashmir internet shutdown, a soldier stands guard in a street divided by barbed wire in Aug 2020.

The Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2020 annual report was published on Jan 4 2021. This analysis of every major government internet shutdown in 2020 revealed their economic impact on a world economy already ravaged by the coronavirus to be in excess of $4 billion. The report also identified additional human rights abuses associated with each government internet outage.

How Much Did Internet Shutdowns Cost Us in 2020?

Read the full 2020 Cost of Internet Shutdowns Report

Government internet outages accompanied protests in Iraq in November 2019.

The 2019 Cost of Internet Shutdowns annual report was published on Jan 7 2020. The report analyzed for the first time every major intentional internet outage over the course of a year and calculated the global cost of shutdowns in 2019 to have been over $8 billion.

How Much Did Internet Shutdowns Cost Us in 2019?

Read the full 2019 Cost of Internet Shutdowns Report

We review every documented government internet outage and social media shutdown globally in a given year.

We include deliberate national internet shutdowns along with regional disruptions that are on a sufficient scale to be economically significant.

The nature, duration and severity of each internet outage are sourced from Netblocks real-time graphic data and reports, IODA and the SFLC.IN Internet Shutdown Tracker.

The economic cost of each internet shutdown is calculated using the Netblocks and the Internet Society’s Cost of Shutdown Tool, which is based on the Brookings Institution method, with CIPESA’s specialized model used for sub-Saharan Africa. Regional shutdown costs are derived from the region’s economic output as a proportion of national GDP.

Partial internet outages are calculated as a proportion of the above costs based on the most up-to-date internet market-share information publicly available for the affected country.

For 2021 data, the tool’s results are modified based on the current exchange rate between the local currency and the USD at the time of the shutdown. This is because the COST tool is based on 2019 exchange rates.

Internet user data is sourced from the World Bank and government reports.

Additional research by Christine O’Donnell

^{[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55923486 ↩}

^{[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-politics-internet/myanmar-orders-wireless-internet-shutdown-until-further-notice-telecoms-sources-idUSKBN2BO5H2?il=0 ↩}

^{[3] https://www.article19.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Myanmar-Internet-Briefing-Paper-UPDATED.pdf ↩}

^{[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-restores-4g-mobile-internet-kashmir-after-18-month-ban-n1256930 ↩}

^{[5] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/01/asia/india-internet-cut-farmers-intl-hnk/index.html ↩}

^{[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-election/uganda-bans-social-media-ahead-of-presidential-election-idUSKBN29H0KH ↩}

^{[7] https://www.upf.go.ug/28-dead-577-arrested-in-the-violent-political-and-criminal-protests/ ↩}

^{[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/30/sudanese-gear-up-for-nationwide-protests-against-military-coup ↩}