In 2022, government restrictions on the work of the Internet in 23 countries, which lasted more than 50 hours, cost the economies of these countries $000 billion, which is 23,79% more than in 323.
The governments of Central Asian countries have a habit of shutting down the Internet to suppress opposition sentiments, and this causes multimillion-dollar losses to national economies. In 2022, Kazakhstan lost 410,3 million dollars. USA and became one of the three very dubious leaders in the world in terms of losses from disconnection of the Internet.
The second "honorable" place is occupied by Iran, which was cut off in 773 million dollars. USA. Russia has lost the most, it occupies a confident leadership position, having lost due to the disconnection of the Internet 21,59 billion dollars. USA.
In total, 23 countries were affected by Internet outages last year. These are the data of the research conducted by analysts Top10VPN and published in January of this year.
The report also included all the countries of Central Asia, except for Kyrgyzstan, the only country in the region where there were no large-scale Internet blackouts.
У Kazakhstan Internet access was shut down mainly due to protests in January 2022. They started as peaceful rallies after a sharp increase in liquefied gas prices, but quickly turned into violent clashes across the country.
On January 4, the authorities shut down mobile Internet for almost an entire day, and then for five days periodically completely shut off access, sometimes for a period of up to 24 hours at a time, according to the study.
The total duration of outages in 2022, including shutdowns during the week-long Bloody January events and other shorter incidents, was 144 hours. Outages affected about 16 million Internet users throughout Kazakhstan.
Uzbekistan also suffered serious economic losses: interruptions in the worldwide network cost him 219,7 million dollars. USA. Moreover, blackouts in the country lasted a total of 5630 hours. Such figures are related to the fact that in the summer the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan was deprived of the Internet for several weeks against the background of bloody riots. Also in 2022, Uzbekistan continued to block popular social networks, including Twitter, which authorities accused of violating local laws. However, the blocking of the social network was lifted in the summer of 2022.
Of Turkmenistan, which took tenth place in the rating, here, at the request of the authorities, residents of the country were deprived of the Internet for 40 hours. This caused the country economic losses in the amount of 29 million dollars. USA.
Information about blackouts in Turkmenistan is scarce due to the repressive regime. However, such outages occurred shortly after the inauguration of the country's new president, Serdar Berdimuhamedov, who succeeded his father, amid international criticism of the lack of free and fair elections.
Tajikistan suffered the least in the region, its losses amounted to 2,1 million dollars. USA due to disconnection of the Internet for 936 hours for the whole year. The government of Tajikistan suspended the provision of the Internet in the Girnych-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in May. This coincided with the start of the "anti-terrorist operation", when residents blocked the road for the military convoy. Internet access was restored a month later without an official announcement of the previous outage, during which 30 people were killed and hundreds detained.
In countries with authoritarian regimes, social networks are blocked the most Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. The table below shows data on how long each platform will be blocked in 2022. Usually several platforms are blocked in the country at once.
