Kenya encountered a substantial financial setback, estimated at USD 27 million (KES 4.2 billion), due to the downtime experienced by the Telegram messaging platform during the final week of the secondary school national examinations in November of the previous year.
London-based Internet rights organization NetBlocks, employing indicators from the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union, calculated the economic impact of social media shutdowns. The eight-day interruption of Telegram significantly affected businesses, resulting in losses amounting to billions of shillings.
NetBlocks’ calculations took into account the monetary value of economic benefits derived from uninterrupted internet and social media usage. Each day that Telegram remained inaccessible translated to an estimated loss of KES 537.0 million in foregone sales, wages, and economic benefits for businesses and the country as a whole.
Telegram, recognized for its widespread use in sharing large multimedia files, boasts approximately 800 million daily active users globally, as reported by the data firm Statista. Despite the outage lasting over a week, the Communications Authority of Kenya did not formally announce or acknowledge it.
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Analysis conducted by Top10VPN revealed that Kenya’s financial loss ranked as the sixteenth largest among the 25 jurisdictions affected by social media outages in the preceding year. The prolonged downtime inconvenienced businesses heavily reliant on Telegram, emphasizing the economic consequences of disruptions to widely used communication platforms. This incident has spurred discussions on the necessity for robust measures to prevent and address such disruptions in the future.
