Iran is losing an estimated $1.56 million per hour due to ongoing state-imposed internet restrictions and filtering, even after partial connectivity was restored following widespread protests in January. Internet privacy analyst Simon Migliano warned that the economic damage is draining the nation’s struggling economy and severely disrupting daily life for over 90 million people.

Migliano, head of research at PrivacyCo, calculated the daily cost at $37.4 million using the NetBlocks COST tool, which measures GDP losses from disrupted digital activity based on data from the World Bank, ITU, Eurostat, and the U.S. Census Bureau. He said the full blackout cost over $780 million, with continued heavy filtering adding further harm. “Iran has already drained $215 million from its economy in 2025 by disrupting internet access,” Migliano noted. The three-week blackout began January 8 amid escalating protests against the regime, cutting communications and forcing reliance on VPNs.

Even after partial restoration of domestic bandwidth, phone calls, and SMS, access remains heavily censored and effectively unusable without circumvention tools. Migliano reported a 579 percent surge in VPN demand as Iranians scrambled for digital survival, with sustained levels 427 percent above normal as users stockpiled tools anticipating future shutdowns. “It becomes a cat-and-mouse game,” he said, as the government blocks servers while providers rotate IPs.

Iran’s Minister of Information and Communications Technology, Sattar Hashemi, acknowledged the toll, stating outages cost roughly 5,000 billion rials daily to the digital economy and nearly 50 trillion rials overall