NEWS

Internet Shutdowns Cost $5.45 Billion in 2021

Yashika Gupta

Jan 23,2024
2 min read
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Internet shutdowns around the world grew 36 percent to over hours in 2021, going the global frugality a whopping$5.45 billion (roughly Rs. crores), according to a report. India was ranked among the top three countries where the cost of Internet shutdowns was the loftiest last time. The report said that the country saw an aggregate of hours of Internet shutdowns in 2021 — involving a total cost of$582.8 million.

The report by the virtual private network (VPN) riveted website Top10VPN noted that global Internet shutdowns affected a population of486.2 million people in 2021. This shows an 80 percent time-over-year proliferation of the impact of Internet shutdowns. As numerous as 50 major Internet outages took place in 21 countries and 75 percent of government outages across the globe were associated with fresh mortal rights abuses.

Myanmar was the leading country where Internet shutdowns bring$2.8 billion (roughly Rs. crores) that lasted for hours and impacted 22 million druggies in 2021. Nigeria came second in the list where outages impacted104.4 million people and involved a cost of$1.5 billion.

Following Myanmar and Nigeria, India took the third spot with the hours of Internet shutdowns that all took place last time and included317.5 hours of complete Internet knockout and 840 hours of bandwidth throttling in which only 2G services were handed.

India's Internet shutdowns in 2021 affected59.1 million people in the country.

Top10 VPN stated that the biggest profitable megahit in India came from strangling Internet pets in Kashmir where the connectivity was eventually restored in February last time — later 18 months of 2G-only access.

“The purposeful retardation to 2G pets rendered the Internet in Kashmir functionally near-useless, causing education and business to suffer during an epidemic that made everyone more dependent on dependable internet access,” the report said.

The government also assessed a localized Internet knockout in Delhi as its early response to the large-scale growers' kick that redounded at a high cost, according to the report.

Internet shutdowns in countries including India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh made Asia the top-most mainland where the total profitable cost of outages was the loftiest at$3.42 billion in 2021. The connectivity loss in the region also impacted 292 million people for hours in total, the report noted.