Government-mandated internet and network shutdowns reached an all-time high in 2025, as they impose increasingly severe social, economic, and security costs while often failing to achieve the policy objectives that the governments seek to deliver, according to a comprehensive new report published in September 2026.
The report is urging governments worldwide to abandon the normalization of internet shutdowns and network disruptions, prioritize less restrictive alternatives, and work with the industry and civil society to keep the world connected.
Titled “Network Shutdowns in a Connected World: Evaluating the Harms and Improving the Guardrails”, the report commissioned by Vodafone Group, a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Newbury in the United Kingdom, brings together independent experts to analyze the sweeping social, security, and economic consequences of cutting off digital connectivity.
According to the report, over the last decade, the frequency, duration, and financial cost of network shutdowns have markedly increased.
The report cites data from Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition to show that 2025 was the worst year on record, with 313 deliberate internet shutdowns across 52 countries, which surpassed previous highs of 304 shutdowns in 2024 and 289 in 2023.
Access Now is an international non-profit organization headquartered in New York City in the United States of America, focused on defending and extending the digital rights of people and communities at risk, while the #KeepItOn Coalition is a global network of more than 345 organisations across 106 countries dedicated to ending internet shutdowns, which is managed and coordinated by Access Now.
The shutdown report noted that many shutdowns have extended for days, weeks, or months, cutting entire communities off simultaneously from domestic and international communications, emergency services, education platforms, and financial systems.
It reported that there were 47 percent more hours of full internet blackouts in 2025 than in 2024, and 66 percent more hours of single-platform social media shutdowns, while in 2025, around 800 million people were affected by deliberate internet or network restrictions.
The report recognises that governments have legitimate responsibilities to protect national security and public safety, and that narrowly targeted, time-bound connectivity restrictions may be justified in exceptional circumstances.
It, however, insists that any such measures must be lawful, necessary, proportionate, transparent, and subject to independent oversight, as, in many countries, network restrictions are also imposed without clear legal frameworks or robust accountability mechanisms.
This is based on the finding that although governments frequently justify these disruptions under the guise of national security, public order, election management, or stopping the spread of misinformation, they have turned out to be high-cost, low-precision interventions that frequently fail to achieve their stated objectives.
One of the other key findings in the report, across sectors, is that connectivity is no longer a luxury but a baseline infrastructure for modern survival and that shutdowns simultaneously cripple healthcare coordination, disrupt e-learning platforms, amplify risks of gender-based violence by cutting off safety apps, and disproportionately harm vulnerable populations like rural communities and low-income households.
It also provides evidence which shows that, rather than enhancing public safety, network shutdowns often provoke surges in violent unrest by destroying organized communication channels that keep protests peaceful, in addition to the fact that cutting off networks degrades national cybersecurity by blocking cloud-mediated threat monitoring, security patches, and critical software updates.
In terms of the economic toll, macroeconomic modeling by Top10VPN highlights that major network shutdowns in 2025 caused an estimated USD 19.7 billion in economic losses globally across 212 major disruptions, while sector-specific studies in the report demonstrate immediate collapses in digital payments, spoiled agricultural supply chains, and paralyzed trade infrastructure. The losses were disproportionately concentrated in low and middle-income countries.
Arguing that blanket, nationwide shutdowns are inherently disproportionate and violate international human rights standards, Vodafone has presented a proposed “Transparent Shutdown Governance Framework” to ensure any connectivity restriction is lawful, necessary, proportionate, and subject to independent oversight.
Mr. Joakim Reiter, Chief External and Corporate Affairs Officer at Vodafone Group, said: “Blanket network shutdowns are never proportionate. But the global scale of shutdowns continues to grow, causing severe and far-reaching consequences for economies and public services. As reliance on connectivity grows, so does the harm and erosion in public trust when it is disrupted.”
According to him, “Governments must re-examine their use of internet restrictions and strengthen their safeguards, including wider coordinated action across industry, regulators, and civil society. That’s why we’ve set out a practical governance framework to improve transparency, accountability, and discipline around shutdowns, ensuring people can remain connected when it matters most.”
The Transparent Shutdown Governance Framework, developed by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa), provides a strict, sequential decision matrix for governments, and mandates that any rare, targeted restriction must satisfy rigorous legal authorization, legitimate aims, strict necessity, proportionality, and comprehensive ex-ante and ex-post accountability measures.
It states that shutdowns can be justified only where there is a clear legal basis, a legitimate public policy objective, and robust evidence demonstrating that the measure is necessary to address a specific, credible threat.
The Framework further requires governments to demonstrate that no less restrictive alternative is available and that the expected benefits outweigh the social, economic, and security harms and insists that if a shutdown fails any of these tests, it should not proceed.
It would also establish stronger procedural safeguards before, during, and after any restriction is imposed, including written orders, independent oversight, regular reviews, access to judicial challenge, and public reporting on the rationale, impact, and effectiveness of any measure.
The Framework insists that it is only where all legal, necessity, proportionality, and accountability tests are satisfied that a shutdown can even be considered, and then only on a narrowly targeted, time-limited basis.
