Putin’s internet shutdown cost Russian economy $12B in 2025

A new report suggests that an “unprecedented internet blackout” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia has cost the country’s economy almost $12 billion in 2025. Experts call this infrastructure-level censorship.

The internet blackout in Russia is now “unprecedented in both scale and technical sophistication.” The crackdown has been “sustained and systemic, combining nationwide blackouts, selective service throttling, and targeted protocol interference.”

That’s the warning in a new report titled “The Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2025.” It finds that Putin’s moves to isolate Russia from the global web have pushed the country to the top of the table, accounting for more than half the total global economic impact recorded last year.

The cost is a $11.9 billion hit to the Russian economy. To put that into perspective, Venezuela is second-placed, taking a much more modest $1.91 billion hit to its already ravaged economy.

The report was prepared by Top10VPN, a website which continuously monitors government-imposed national and regional internet outages and social media shutdowns worldwide.

They estimate the economic impact of each restriction using the NetBlocks COST tool. Its methodology is based on indicators from the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat, and the US Census.

According to the report, unlike the shorter, event-driven outages seen elsewhere, Russia’s shutdowns were sustained and systemic, combining nationwide blackouts, selective service throttling, and targeted protocol interference.

One notable tactic used by the Kremlin has been the so-called “16 KB Curtain.” It throttles access to Cloudflare-hosted and other Western websites by allowing only the first 16 kilobytes of data to load.

“While not a full blackout, this rendered most modern web services effectively unusable, creating widespread disruption while preserving the appearance of partial connectivity,” said the report.

“This approach functionally isolated Russian users from the global internet while reducing the visibility and political cost of overt bans.”

According to Top10VPN, these measures reflect a broader shift toward infrastructure-level censorship: persistent, technically precise restrictions designed to suppress access to information, undermine economic activity, and complicate circumvention.

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