Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $19.7B in 2025 1/9/26, 2:49 PM Note: In some cases, total shutdown duration exceeds 8,760 hours (365 days) within a single country. This occurs where multiple internet disruptions overlapped across different regions or networks at the same time. Because these represented distinct, concurrent experiences of disruption, they are counted independently. We applied the same principle where different restriction types occurred simultaneously, for example, a mobile internet blackout alongside social media blocks on fixed-line or broadband connections. For individual internet shutdowns, see the Cost of Internet Shutdowns 2025 Data Sheet. Russia’s wave of internet disruptions in 2025 was unprecedented in both scale and technical sophistication, making it the single largest contributor to global economic losses. Unlike the shorter, event-driven outages seen elsewhere, Russia’s shutdowns were sustained and systemic, combining nationwide blackouts, selective service throttling, and targeted protocol interference. This strategy pushed Russia to the top of the Cost By Country table, accounting for more than half of the total global economic impact recorded in 2025. A particularly notable tactic was the so-called “16 KB Curtain”, which throttled access to Cloudflare-hosted and other Western websites by allowing only the first ~16 kilobytes of data to load. While not a full blackout, this rendered most modern web services effectively unusable, https://www.top10vpn.com/research/cost-of-internet-shutdowns/ Page 8 of 33