A privacy and internet security analyst says that Iran, due to internet shutdowns imposed by the Iranian regime, loses 1.56 million dollars every hour, further damaging its already stagnant economy and disrupting the lives of more than 90 million people.
Simon Migliano, head of research at the privacy company Privacy, told Fox News about Iran’s prolonged internet shutdowns that the losses caused by these disruptions continue even after partial internet connectivity is restored.
In this interview, which was published on Wednesday, February 4, he noted: “The current blackout is costing Iran an estimated $37.4 million per day, or $1.56 million every hour.”
Migliano added that the complete internet shutdown has cost Iran more than 780 million dollars, and subsequent strict filtering continues to have a significant economic impact.
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He added: “Iran has already drained $215 million from its economy in 2025 by disrupting internet access.”
Migliano said his estimates were calculated using the “NetBlocks Cost” tool, an economic model that measures the immediate impact on a country’s gross domestic product when its digital economy is forcibly taken offline.
According to Fox, this model assesses the direct damage to productivity, online transactions, and remote work using data from the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat, and the United States Census Bureau.
Earlier, Sattar Hashemi, the Iranian regime’s minister of communications, said last week that internet shutdowns cause daily losses of five quadrillion rials to Iran’s economy (approximately 31.25 million dollars).
He also announced on February 1 that internet speeds have not yet returned to the conditions prior to January 7 and 8, and that traffic levels remain low.
Internet access in Iran was cut by Iranian regime authorities on Thursday night, January 8, following widespread public protests.
Fox wrote: “While officials later restored much of the country’s domestic bandwidth, as well as local and international phone calls and SMS messaging, the population is largely unable to freely access the internet because of heavy state filtering.”
Before explaining how, even when access is briefly restored, the internet remains heavily censored and effectively unusable without circumvention tools such as VPNs, Migliano said:
“We can see spikes showing that as soon as connectivity returned, users immediately sought VPNs to reach sites and services outside the state-controlled network, including global platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram that remain otherwise inaccessible.”
He said:”Sustained demand — averaging 427% above normal levels — indicates Iranians are stockpiling circumvention tools in anticipation of further blackouts.”
Migliano added: “The usual strategy is to download as many free tools as possible and cycle between them. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game, as the government blocks individual VPN servers and providers rotate IP addresses to stay ahead of the censors.”
He pointed out: “Iran’s three-week internet blackout may have been lifted, but connectivity remains severely disrupted still.”
“Access is still heavily filtered. It is restricted to a government-approved ‘whitelist’ of sites and apps and the connection itself remains highly unstable throughout the day,” Migliano claimed.
In this regard, Conduit statistics show that daily connections by Iranian users to the Conduit–Psiphon network have risen from a few thousand to more than 29 million.
According to data from the Conduit website, prior to January 20, the number of daily connections from Iran was fewer than 8,000.
