ISLAMABAD: Pakistan suffered highest financial losses in the world this past year due to Internet outages and shutdown of social media applications, a global Internet monitor said this week.
The South Asian country of more than 240 million people remained the single most affected nation in the world in 2024, incurring a total of $1.62 billion financial losses.
This was higher than the cost in civil war-ravaged countries like Sudan and Myanmar, according to a report released by Top10VPN.com, an independent VPN reviewer, on Jan. 2.
The monitor said Internet disruptions lasted 9,735 hours in Pakistan and impacted 82.9 million users, citing election and protests as major reasons behind these outages in the South Asian country.
“Asia was by far the most-affected region, thanks to the particularly impactful Internet restrictions in Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India,” it said. “These nations were four of the six most-affected countries in 2024.”

In Feb. 2024, Pakistan held its general election that was marred by a mobile Internet shutdown and unusually delayed results, leading to accusations that it was rigged and drawing concern from rights groups and foreign governments. Pakistani election authorities denied the allegations.
Opposition parties, mainly former prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, held several protest rallies last year to demand an audit of the election results. Day later, social media website X went down in Pakistan, with the government saying the block was for “security reasons.”
Worldwide, according to Top10VPN.com, Internet shutdowns caused economic losses of $7.69 billion in 2024. These outages lasted 88,788 hours, a 12 percent increase from 2023 and highest to date, and affected 648.4 million people across the globe.
“This kind of deliberate outage is Internet censorship in its most extreme form,” the monitor said. “Not only do they infringe on citizens’ digital rights but they are also catastrophic acts of national economic self-sabotage.”
The calculations were made using the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST), based on indicators from the World Bank and other global institutions.