Internet outages usually happen due to a technical fault on the service provider’s side, but they are also induced by governments on purpose. There are many reasons for governments to shut down the internet, such as censoring online protestors, but it comes at a great cost.
A new report from Top10VPN puts this into perspective. The report says that government-ordered shutdowns have cost the global economy more than $10 billion in 2022 so far. This is double the amount from last year and we are barely halfway through 2022.
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The research team at Top10VPN tracked government shutdowns in 16 countries and measured the cost per day of shutdowns, specifically preventing millions of protestors in Russia and Pakistan.
Other reasons for government internet shutdowns included efforts to stop students from cheating in exams in Sudan, Syrian, Algeria, and others. The non-conflict-based shutdowns were not any cheaper than others, costing more than $6 million on a daily basis to the global economy.
It is worth mentioning that the report from Top10VPN only focuses on major shutdowns without accounting for additional economic and human rights costs of smaller outages. Hence, it is likely that the total cost to the global economy is actually much higher than reported.
However, experts agree with TopVPN’s report patterns predicting that costs will continue to spiral out of control as internet shutdowns become more common across the globe to restrict online activity for various reasons.
