Africa’s 2025 internet shutdown story was not a side issue about apps, websites, or temporary inconvenience. It was a direct economic shock.
Across the continent, governments and authorities cut, throttled, or restricted access during elections, protests, unrest, and information-control campaigns, draining well over a billion dollars from already pressured economies.
Top10VPN’s 2025 global shutdown report put worldwide losses at $19.7 billion across 28 countries and more than 120,000 disruption hours, with 2025 becoming one of the most expensive years on record for digital repression.
The cleanest Africa figure is about $1.11 billion, not because the larger headline is fabricated, but because one widely shared summary mixes 11 African countries with Papua New Guinea, which is outside Africa.
The Technext list branded the tally as “12 African governments” and attached a $1.12 billion headline to it, yet its own country breakdown includes Papua New Guinea at $0.8 million.
Add only the African entries in that list, and the subtotal lands at roughly $1.114 billion, which aligns with separate reporting that places sub-Saharan Africa’s 2025 shutdown cost at $1.11 billion, with 24,276 hours of disruption affecting 116.1 million users.
Africa’s 2025 internet shutdown losses by country
| Country | Estimated loss |
|---|---|
| Tanzania | $889.8 million |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | $67.2 million |
| Sudan | $66.6 million |
| Cameroon | $40.5 million |
| Togo | $23.2 million |
| Guinea-Bissau | $10.1 million |
| South Sudan | $8.8 million |
| Kenya | $3.4 million |
| Guinea | $2.0 million |
| Libya | $1.3 million |
| Equatorial Guinea | $1.1 million |
Tanzania turned a regional crisis into a continental bill
Tanzania did not merely top the list. It dominated it. Its $889.8 million loss accounts for nearly four-fifths of the African subtotal, making the country the single biggest reason the continent’s 2025 shutdown bill ballooned.
The Technext summary says Tanzania logged 6,966 hours of internet blackout and ranked fifth globally for financial loss. The restrictions were not one clean blackout either.
Tanzania blocked X twice in 2025, first after cyberattacks on government-linked accounts, and later amid claims tied to pornographic content, before a broader election-period disruption followed the October 29, 2025, vote.
AP reporting confirms that Tanzanian authorities blocked access to X after the cyberattack episode, while later reporting tied election unrest to an internet shutdown that lasted for the day of the vote and the next 10 days.
That matters because Tanzania reveals the new shape of censorship in Africa. Governments no longer need a single dramatic nationwide unplugging to inflict deep economic damage.
Repeated platform blocks, partial network interference, and election-timed slowdowns can crush commerce just as effectively, especially in economies where mobile internet is the working layer for payments, messaging, deliveries, customer service, and political communication.
When a country as digitally central as Tanzania restricts access in waves, the economic pain compounds long before the blackout makes international headlines.
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The rest of the damage was smaller than Tanzania’s, but it was not small
Once Tanzania is stripped out, the remaining losses still paint a brutal picture. The DRC lost $67.2 million after a three-day outage in January linked to the M23 advance on Goma. Sudan lost $66.6 million across four shutdown episodes in January, July, September, and November.
Cameroon lost $40.5 million after a post-election blackout tied to unrest following President Biya’s re-election. Togo followed with $23.2 million, driven by a long-running block on major social and messaging platforms and reduced speeds that stretched beyond 2,000 hours.
Together, those four countries account for the overwhelming bulk of the non-Tanzanian damage.
Below that top tier, the numbers stayed smaller, but the pattern stayed ugly. Guinea-Bissau lost $10.1 million amid coup-related and electoral restrictions.
South Sudan lost $8.8 million after authorities imposed a social media restriction that began on January 22 before reversing course within days. Kenya lost $3.4 million in a much shorter but politically explosive episode during the June 25, 2025 anti-government protests, when authorities were accused of throttling speeds and restricting access to Telegram.
Guinea, Libya, and Equatorial Guinea rounded out the list with smaller monetary totals, but in Equatorial Guinea the Annobón blackout stands out because it shows how prolonged regional isolation can distort everyday life even when the national dollar figure looks modest on paper.
Platform blocking is becoming the preferred shutdown playbook
The old image of an internet shutdown is a country going fully dark. The 2025 reality was more calculating. Top10VPN’s methodology explicitly counts social media shutdowns and severe throttling because governments have learned that making services functionally useless can deliver nearly the same political result as a full blackout.
In 2025, X became the most disrupted social platform globally, with 18,354 blocked hours. Top10VPN identifies Tanzania’s ongoing X blockade, which began in May, as the single biggest contributor.
Telegram accumulated nearly as many blocked hours, with Russia driving most of the total and Togo adding a notable share.
That shift matters for Africa because selective blocks are easier for authorities to defend in public and harder for businesses to plan around.
A government can say the internet is still technically “on” even when traders cannot receive orders, creators cannot publish, drivers cannot navigate, journalists cannot verify reports, and customers cannot reach sellers.
Kenya’s June 2025 Telegram restrictions became even more striking because civil society groups pointed out that a High Court injunction had already stopped state agencies and telcos from interfering with internet access while a constitutional challenge was pending.
The lesson is plain: 2025 was not just a year of shutdowns. It was a year of more strategic, more politically convenient digital suffocation.
Why the economic damage hits so fast
The financial losses are easier to understand when we stop imagining the internet as entertainment and start treating it as infrastructure.
The Internet Society warns that shutdowns damage productivity, break time-sensitive transactions, disrupt online public services, undermine user trust, and tarnish a country’s digital environment.
Human Rights Watch has documented the same reality from another angle: when internet access disappears, people lose access to work, banking, food programs, and basic communication channels that now sit inside everyday digital systems.
In African economies with high mobile dependence, that damage arrives instantly.
A shutdown freezes more than tweets. It can stall mobile money, disrupt fintech rails, interrupt e-commerce checkouts, delay logistics, sever merchant-customer communication, and knock gig workers out of income for the day.
It can also break the informal economy’s thin margins, because small traders often rely on WhatsApp orders, Telegram groups, mobile transfers, and cloud-based recordkeeping rather than formal storefront systems.
That is why even shorter events, such as Kenya’s 24-hour restriction window or Libya’s 11-hour localized blackout in Tripoli, still carry measurable cost. The direct losses are visible. The secondary losses to trust, investment climate, and digital adoption linger even longer.
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Africa entered 2025 after a record-breaking shutdown year
The continent did not drift into this crisis by accident. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 21 shutdowns in 15 African countries in 2024, the highest annual total ever recorded for the region.
Their findings showed that protests were the leading trigger, followed by information control and election-related restrictions.
In the same period, Equatorial Guinea’s Annobón shutdown persisted, Kenya blocked Telegram during exams and protests, and new offenders joined the list. Africa entered 2025 with the playbook already tested and normalized.
That makes the policy failure impossible to ignore. In March 2024, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted Resolution 580, urging states to ensure open and secure internet access before, during, and after elections and to refrain from shutting down the internet or disrupting digital platforms around electoral periods.
Yet Tanzania, Cameroon, and others still moved in the opposite direction. The legal and normative signal was already on the table. The shutdowns kept coming anyway.
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