When you lose your internet connection, your world seems to crumble. You can’t work, you can’t notify your colleagues, you can’t access your university notes, and you certainly can’t check your order on Amazon. Without internet, our world shuts down.
That’s why the importance of being online will never be emphasized enough. If we were to lose all internet connectivity for a minute, countries’ economies would lose millions of dollars and large companies hundreds of thousands.
Although a total Internet outage is unlikely to occur, the consequences would be disastrous from an economic point of view. The magazine PCMag has used the NetBlocks Cost of Shutdown tool to calculate the impact that a blackout would have on the global economy, in each country and in large technology companies.
20 million dollars in one minute
The data estimates that a single minute of total Internet interruption would cost the global economy over 20 million dollars. The United States would be the most affected country, with a loss of 7.6 million dollars, followed by China (6.8 million), United Kingdom (2.2 million), Japan (1.8 million), and Germany (1 million).
It would only take one day for those figures to reach hundreds of millions and several billions of dollars in losses. If we all survived for a year, the figure would rise to trillions: specifically, 4 trillion dollars for the United States.
If we look at the different companies affected by an Internet shutdown, one might imagine that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be the biggest loser. But even though the company ranks second on the list with a loss of $538,120 per minute, it still falls behind Amazon.
With its shopping, AWS, and streaming businesses inaccessible, the company would lose nearly one million dollars for every minute the world is without internet. A year without internet would cost Amazon almost 514 billion dollars.
The figures use the company’s revenues in 2022. That was before OpenAI fully launched ChatGPT, so the AI company would likely rank higher on the list if more recent revenue figures were used.
PCMag has chosen the companies that rely the most on the Internet. Companies like Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia would undoubtedly lose a lot of money if the Internet were suddenly interrupted, but these companies already existed in the early days of the Internet in the nineties, so they would probably survive with their hardware and software projects.
