Kenya is estimated to have lost $27.02 million (Sh4.2 billion) due to the Telegram downtime experienced in November last year during the last week of the secondary school national examinations.
Calculations by NetBlocks, a London-based internet rights organisation shows that the eight-day shutdown of the popular messaging platform in Kenya significantly inconvenienced businesses relying on it, making them incur billions of shillings in losses.
For each day that Telegram was down, businesses and the country are estimated to have lost a total of Sh537 million in foregone sales, wages, and economic benefits that are estimated to trickle down from use of the application in Kenya.
The outage experienced for over a week, was never formally announced or acknowledged by the Communications Authority of Kenya, but its coincidence with the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations may have been an indication that the shutdown was a measure to curtail cheating in the college-entry tests.
NetBlocks calculates the economic cost of social media shutdowns from World Bank and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) indicators, which estimate, in monetary terms, economic benefits generated in a country from uninterrupted internet and social media use. Telegram, an instant messaging platform mostly used for sharing large multimedia files, is one of the most popular social media platforms in Kenya and globally, with an estimated 800 million daily active users, according to data firm Statista.
Analysis by Top10VPN, an internet privacy and security organisation in Britain, shows that Kenya’s loss was the 16th largest out of all the 25 jurisdictions that shut the internet or different social media platforms last year.
Jointly, the 25 countries, which include Tanzania, Sudan, and Ethiopia, lost $9 billion (Sh1.4 trillion) to the internet disruptions, which generally lasted for 79,238 hours, an 18 per cent increase from 2022.
“This kind of deliberate disruption is internet censorship in its most extreme form. Not only do these internet outages infringe on citizens’ digital rights but they are also acts of national economic self-harm,” said Top10VPN’s digital rights lead Samuel Woodhams and their head of research, Simon Migliano, in a joint statement.
