Telegram, a popular social media network in Kenya, experienced an unexpected outage coinciding with the country’s critical college admission exams.
Speculation developed over the reason for the outage, with some speculating a link to preventing examination malpractice, given that the app was only unavailable during the day, returning to normalcy at night when exams were not taking place.
NetBlocks, a London-based internet rights organization, did calculations suggesting that the eight-day closure had a significant impact on Kenyan enterprises, resulting in losses of billions of Kenyan Shillings.
Each day of Telegram’s inaccessibility is estimated to have cost businesses and the country Ksh537 million ($3.4 million) non lost sales, wages, and economic advantages associated with the app’s use.
A study conducted by Top10VPN, a UK-based internet privacy and security group, provided light on the global scope of such disruptions. Kenya’s loss during the 192-hour Telegram shutdown was the fifteenth greatest among the 25 jurisdictions that had internet or social media platform outages in the previous year. The cost to the country was $27 million, affecting 15.6 million people.
The incident in Kenya underscores an increasing concern about internet outages throughout Africa. According to Top10VPN research, Sub-Saharan Africa could face a $1.74 billion financial setback in 2023 due to 30,785 hours of internet unavailability, affecting an estimated 84.8 million individuals.
Globally, a troubling trend emerged, demonstrating that 50% of government-caused internet disruptions in 2023 were linked to additional human rights violations, with limits on freedom of assembly being the most often cited violation.
Major internet outages in Africa have been ascribed primarily to military coups and protests inside the continent.
As the globe grapples with the consequences of such disruptions, the occurrence in Kenya serves as a vivid reminder of the greater global trend and its repercussions for corporations, citizens, and human rights.