Iran internet disruption drains $1.56 million hourly from economy, analyst says

Iran is losing an estimated $1.56 million every hour due to a state-imposed internet blackout, depleting its struggling economy and disrupting the lives of more than 90 million people, according to an internet privacy analyst.

The lengthy outages came as protests escalated throughout January, claiming losses continued even after partial connectivity was restored.

“The current power outage is costing Iran an estimated $37.4 million per day, or $1.56 million per hour,” said research leader Simon Migliano. at PrivacyCohe told Fox News Digital. “The entire internet outage cost Iran more than $780 million, and the stringent filtering that followed continues to have a significant additional economic impact.”

“Iran has already drained $215 million from its economy in 2025 by disrupting internet access,” the internet privacy and security analyst added.

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Migliano said his estimates were calculated using the formula: NetBlocks COST toolAn economic model that measures the immediate impact on a country’s gross domestic product when its digital economy is forced offline.

The model evaluates direct losses in productivity, online transactions, and remote work based on data from the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

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According to the NetBlocks organization, internet access has been completely cut off in Iran as of January 9, 2026, following the protests that swept the country. (Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Iranian authorities abruptly cut off communications on the night of January 8 amid widespread protests against the religious regime.

While authorities subsequently restored much of the country’s domestic bandwidth, local and international phone calls, and SMS messages, the public remains largely unable to freely access the internet due to heavy government filtering.

“The recent 579% increase in VPN demand reflects the fight for digital survival,” Migliano said, before explaining how even when access was briefly restored, the internet remained “heavily censored and effectively unusable without circumvention tools such as VPNs.”

“As soon as connectivity is restored, we may see spikes showing users immediately seeking VPNs to access sites and services outside the state-controlled network, including otherwise inaccessible global platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram,” he added.

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“The recent 579% increase in VPN demand reflects the drive for digital survival,” Migliano said. (UGC via AP)

“Sustained demand, averaging 427% above normal levels, suggests Iranians are stockpiling bypass tools in anticipation of further power outages,” Migliano said. he said.

“The general strategy is to download as many free tools as possible and switch between them. This becomes a cat-and-mouse game as the government blocks individual VPN servers and providers change IP addresses to stay ahead of censors,” he added.

Sattar Hashemi, Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, acknowledged the economic toll caused by blackout tactics.

He said the latest outages have led to losses of approximately 5,000 billion riyals per day in the digital economy and approximately 50 trillion riyals in the general economy. Iran International.

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“Iran’s three-week internet blackout may have been lifted, but connectivity is still severely disrupted,” Migliano said.

“Access is still heavily filtered. It’s limited to a government-approved ‘whitelist’ of sites and apps, and the connection itself remains highly unstable throughout the day,” he added.