Government-ordered internet shutdowns have become more frequent almost every year since 2019: Access Now counted at least 313 in 52 countries in 2025, up from 213 in 2019. There is no neutral, openly published annual figure for their global economic cost. The published estimates cover individual events, mostly built with the NetBlocks COST model, and they show that a single nationwide blackout can drain tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from an economy. These estimates come from NGOs, business associations and officials, and they should be read as rough orders of magnitude, not precise losses.
Shutdown counts by year
The most widely cited count comes from Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, which has tracked deliberate disruptions since 2016. These include full blackouts, mobile-data cuts, bandwidth throttling and blocks on specific platforms. Its 2025 report recorded at least 313 shutdowns, beating the previous record (Access Now, 2026).
The counts get revised, because Access Now adds incidents it verifies after publication. The 2024 total was first reported as 296 and later as 304. 2023 rose from 283 to 289, and 2022 from 187 to 201 (Access Now, 2024; Access Now, 2026).
Trackers also disagree. Internet Society Pulse uses its own methodology and logs far fewer incidents: 167 in 2020, 68 in 2021, 54 in 2022, 124 in 2023 and 133 in 2024 (Internet Society, 2025).
Shutdowns and published cost estimates by year, 2019 to 2026
| Year | Access Now count (as first reported) | Later revised count | Internet Society Pulse incidents | Example published cost estimate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 213 in 33 countries | 221 | n/a | Iran, Nov 16-21: NetBlocks put the cost at $369.5M per day; a former head of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce estimated $1.5B in total | Access Now; Atlantic Council |
| 2020 | 155 in 29 countries | 159 | 167 | Belarus, Aug 9-12 election outage: about $170M (NetBlocks) | Access Now; Jamestown |
| 2021 | 182 in 34 countries | n/a | 68 | Nigeria’s Twitter block from June 2021: about $250,000 per hour (NetBlocks, as reported by the BBC) | Access Now; Global Voices |
| 2022 | 187 in 35 countries | 201 in 40 countries | 54 | Iran, September protest curfews on mobile data: $1.5M per hour (ISNA news agency) | Access Now; The New Arab |
| 2023 | 283 in 39 countries | 289 | 124 | Senegal, June mobile-data suspension: $332,502 per hour (NetBlocks) | Access Now; Techpoint Africa |
| 2024 | 296 in 54 countries | 304 | 133 | Bangladesh, July blackout: about $300M in losses claimed by e-commerce and outsourcing industry groups | Access Now; Rest of World |
| 2025 | 313 in 52 countries | n/a | 40 (first half only) | Tanzania, Oct 29-Nov 3 election blackout: at least $72.3M; X block since May 21: $165.8M (Paradigm Initiative via NetBlocks COST) | Access Now; Paradigm Initiative |
| 2026 (to date) | Not yet published | n/a | n/a | Iran, blackout from Feb 28: $30-40M per day in direct losses, $70-80M including indirect losses (chamber of commerce official) | RFE/RL |
“n/a” means the reviewed sources published no figure. Each cost figure describes one event, not an annual global total.
Countries with the most shutdowns
For years, India topped the Access Now ranking. It recorded 106 shutdowns in 2021 and 116 in 2023, mostly regional cuts (Access Now, 2022; Access Now, 2024). In 2024 Myanmar overtook it with 85 shutdowns against India’s 84, and Myanmar stayed first in 2025 with at least 95 (Access Now, 2025; Access Now, 2026). The rest of the 2025 list included India (65), Pakistan (20) and Iran (11). Access Now officially logged 20 shutdowns by Russian authorities, but it said emerging evidence pointed to hundreds or even thousands of regional disruptions inside Russia (Access Now, 2026).
The reasons have changed as well. Conflict became the leading trigger in 2023 and stayed there. Access Now counted 125 conflict-related shutdowns across 14 countries in 2025, about 40% of the total. Blocks on satellite internet also appeared: 14 across seven countries in 2025, compared with four in 2024 (Access Now, 2026).
Some recent blackouts were nationwide and lasted for weeks. The Taliban cut fiber and mobile internet across Afghanistan on September 29, 2025, pushing traffic below 1% of normal levels (Amnesty International, 2025). Iran’s blackout that began on February 28, 2026 had passed 52 days by late April, according to NetBlocks figures cited by RFE/RL (2026).
How shutdown costs are estimated
Most published dollar figures come from one model, the NetBlocks Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST). NetBlocks and the Internet Society launched it on December 10, 2018 (Internet Society, 2018). It builds on a Brookings Institution method for global coverage and a CIPESA model for sub-Saharan Africa that accounts for informal economies, and combines these with World Bank, ITU, Eurostat and U.S. Census indicators. NetBlocks says its outputs are illustrative estimates that may change over time (NetBlocks).
The Brookings approach dates to a 2016 study by Darrell West. It counted 81 short shutdowns in 19 countries between July 2015 and June 2016 and estimated at least $2.4 billion in lost GDP. The inputs were GDP, duration, the share of the population affected, the size of the digital economy, mobile penetration and a multiplier (Brookings, 2016).
The Internet Society’s newer NetLoss calculator uses econometrics instead. It estimates effects on GDP, unemployment and foreign direct investment. In 2024 it put Myanmar’s three years of platform blocking at $232 million in GDP losses (Internet Society Pulse, 2024). The calculator now carries a warning that results have been much lower than expected. The Internet Society says it “can’t currently recommend relying on the results” (Internet Society Pulse). That warning also covers NetLoss figures quoted in its 2025 policy brief, including about $411,000 for one day of Bangladesh’s August 2024 shutdown.
Why the estimates disagree so much
The Iran 2019 case shows the spread. NetBlocks’ daily figure implies roughly $1.8 billion over five days, while a former chamber of commerce chief estimated $1.5 billion in total. In 2026, Iran’s telecommunications minister put the core damage to the digital economy at about $35 million per day. A chamber of commerce official said that indirect losses roughly double the direct ones (RFE/RL, 2026).
Four factors drive the gaps:
- Scope differs. Some figures count only lost digital output, while others add trade, tourism or payment disruption.
- Mobile-only, regional or platform-specific blocks are scaled down from national figures, and those scaling assumptions vary.
- The estimator matters. Governments that order a shutdown have reasons to report low numbers, and industry groups may report high ones. Bangladesh’s roughly $300 million figure came from e-commerce and outsourcing associations and also covered the wider political crisis (Rest of World, 2024).
- None of these models captures lost investment confidence, harm to health care and education, or human rights costs. The Internet Society calls its figures conservative estimates of direct impact (Internet Society, 2025).
How to prepare for a shutdown
- Expect shutdowns around predictable events. Elections, protests, exams and armed conflict are the main triggers in every recent Access Now report. If you live in or travel to a country with a history of shutdowns, plan ahead for those periods.
- Know which kind of disruption you face. A VPN or circumvention tool can help when specific platforms are blocked. It cannot help during a full blackout, because there is no connection to tunnel through.
- Prepare offline fallbacks. Download maps, documents and contact lists in advance, and agree on SMS or in-person fallbacks with family or colleagues.
- Businesses whose operations, suppliers or remote staff depend on connectivity in high-risk countries should price in the risk and build redundancy and contingency plans. The cost estimates above are lower bounds.
- Check live monitors. Access Now, Internet Society Pulse, NetBlocks, OONI and Georgia Tech’s IODA publish disruption data that can confirm whether an outage is deliberate.
Methodology and limitations
Shutdown counts come from Access Now’s annual #KeepItOn reports and press releases for 2019 to 2025; where a later report revised a year’s total, the table shows both figures. Internet Society Pulse counts come from its October 2025 policy brief. Cost figures are limited to estimates published by NGOs (NetBlocks, Paradigm Initiative, Internet Society), research institutions (Brookings), named officials or business associations, as reported by the organization itself or by established media. Each year shows one well-documented event. Per-event estimates are not added up into annual totals, because the methods differ.
Annual global cost totals published by commercial VPN-industry trackers are excluded. Only NGO, academic, official and news sources whose figures could be checked directly are used. The table therefore gives no global dollar figure per year, and the examples should not be read as representative of all shutdowns that year. Figures in local currency were left in the U.S. dollar values given by the source, without conversion or adjustment for inflation.