Government Internet Shutdowns Have Cost $44.8 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 2023
• The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2022
• The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 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. 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

The most severe internet outages in 2023 to date have been in Ethiopia, where authorities blocked access to Facebook, YouTube, Telegram and TikTok following an escalation of religious tensions in early February. While the rift between the government and the Orthodox church was resolved withing weeks, the social media restrictions lasted over five months.^[1]

Demand for VPN services skyrocketed in Ethiopia as people sought to circumvent the internet restrictions.

Internet access remains heavily disrupted in numerous townships in north-west Myanmar, despite recent efforts by local resistance groups to bring some of them back online. Many of these internet shutdowns date back as far as 2021, while others were imposed in early 2022.

Our 2023 tracker only calculates the economic impact this year to date. Prior years’ data can be found in the relevant annual reports.

Access to Twitter in Myanmar also remains possible for only around half of the time.

Authorities in India imposed the most severe internet blackout of recent times in March when they restricted access for the whole state of Punjab during a manhunt for a Sikh separatist leader. The internet outage, which affected all mobile internet and SMS communications, lasted three full days before being reduced to apply to specific areas only. In May, another statewide internet blackout was imposed in Manipur, in India’s north-east, following an outbreak of ethnic violence, and was still in place months later.

Pakistan authorities cut access to mobile internet nationwide for four days and also blocked Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the wake of violent protests that erupted when former Prime Minister Imran Khan was arrested in May. The economic impact of the internet blackout was very severe, at $50.2 million per day, and significantly undermined self-employed workers ability to earn a living.

Open the Internet now!! It’s been three days that internet shutdown has caused loss to thousands of businesses, have some mercy on freelancers and gig workers who are trying to survive in this crumbling economy. #KeepItOn

— Nighat Dad (@nighatdad) May 11, 2023

Authorities in Iraq imposed daily social media shutdowns during the February exam period in the country, the disruptions lasting 64 hours in total. Internet blackouts were imposed throughout June, July and August during subsequent examinations.

Twitter was blocked in Turkey in the aftermath of a serious earthquake in February. The restrictions were imposed after criticism of the Turkish government’s response to the crisis circulated on the social media platform. VPN demand immediately surged in Turkey following the Twitter restrictions and access was restored the next day after a major backlash.^[2]

While internet blackouts were often severe during the civil conflict in Sudan the erupted April, the majority of these have been excluded from the tracker as they were not deliberate outages and were instead as a result of power outages and fuel shortages.

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 restrictions following government orders to do so. 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.

Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2022 report main image: photo of fire in Lviv, Ukraine after Russian bombing

The Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2022 annual report was published on Jan 3 2023. This analysis of every major deliberate internet outage imposed by national governments in 2022 calculated their economic impact to be over $24.67 billion. The report also identified additional human rights abuses associated with each of these government internet outages.

How Much Did Internet Shutdowns Cost Us in 2022?

Read the full 2022 Cost of Internet Shutdowns Report

Protestors in Myanmar following a military coup in Feb 2021 that led to a vicious crackdown on dissent, which included severe internet restrictions.

The Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2021 annual report was published on Jan 4 2022. This analysis of every major deliberate internet outage imposed by national governments in 2021 calculated their economic impact to be over $5.6 billion. The report also identified additional human rights abuses associated with each of these government internet outages.

How Much Did Internet Shutdowns Cost Us in 2021?

Read the full 2021 Cost of Internet Shutdowns Report

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 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.

Internet user data is sourced from the World Bank and government reports. For social media shutdowns, the total number of internet users in the affected location is cited rather than the number of local users of a specific platform. This is because such internet outages affects all internet users’ ability to access social media regardless of their active use of a particular platform.

Main image: People and emergency teams search for survivors in the rubble of a destroyed building, in Iskenderun, Turkey, February 7, 2023. Credit: CTK / Alamy Stock Photo.

^{[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-64597375 ↩}

^{[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/twitter-restored-in-turkey-after-meeting-with-government-officials.html ↩}