Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $19.7B in 2025 1/9/26, 2:49 PM Our coverage includes nationwide internet blackouts as well as large-scale regional disruptions that are economically significant. Details on the nature, duration, and severity of each outage are drawn from Netblocks real-time data and reports, IODA, the SFLC.IN Internet Shutdown Tracker, and OONI’s censorship measurement tools. The economic cost of each shutdown is calculated using the Netblocks Cost of Shutdown Tool, based on the Brookings Institution methodology, with CIPESA’s specialised model applied for sub-Saharan Africa. Regional shutdown costs are scaled according to the region’s share of national GDP. Partial outages are estimated proportionally using the latest internet market-share data available for the affected country. Despite not being full blackouts at the national scale, these disruptions cumulatively represent significant economic impact. In cases where connectivity remains technically available but is restricted to such an extent that modern web services are largely unusable (for example, extreme throughput throttling or protocol-level interference), we classify the disruption based on its functional impact rather than its nominal connectivity status. In these cases, economic impact is estimated as a partial or platform-level outage, reflecting the loss of practical access to online services. Internet user figures come from the World Bank and official government reports. For social media shutdowns, we use the total number of internet users in the affected area rather than the platform-specific user base, as outages affect all users’ ability to access the platform. Shutdowns lasting more than 365 days are excluded from the report. We classify these as permanent censorship, assuming the economic impact decreases as users shift to alternative platforms. https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ Page 31 of 33