Kenya misplaced Sh4.2bn to Telegram shutdown in 2023

The Telegram messenger app. PHOTO | AFP

Kenya is estimated to have misplaced $27.02 million (Sh4.2 billion) because of the Telegram downtime skilled in November final yr over the last week of the secondary faculty nationwide examinations.

Calculations by NetBlocks, a London-based web rights organisation reveals that the 8-day shutdown of the favored messaging platform in Kenya considerably inconvenienced companies counting on it, making them incur billions in losses.

For every day that Telegram was down, the companies and the nation are estimated to have misplaced a complete of Sh537 million in foregone gross sales, wages, and financial advantages which are estimated to trickle down from use of the appliance in Kenya.

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NetBlocks calculates the financial value of social media shutdowns from World Financial institution and Worldwide Telecommunications Union (ITU) indicators, which estimate, in financial phrases, the financial advantages generated in a rustic from uninterrupted web and social media use.

Telegram, an immediate messaging platform largely used for sharing massive multimedia recordsdata, is among the hottest social media platforms in Kenya and globally, with an estimated 800 million every day lively customers, in keeping with information agency Statista.

The outage skilled for greater than per week final yr, was by no means formally introduced or acknowledged by the Communications Authority of Kenya, however its coincidence with the Kenya Certificates of Secondary Schooling examinations could have been a sign that the shutdown was a measure to curtail dishonest within the college-entry exams.

Evaluation by Top10VPN, an web privateness and safety organisation within the UK, reveals that Kenya’s loss was the sixteenth largest out of all of the 25 jurisdictions that shutdown the web or completely different social media platforms final yr.

Collectively, the 25 nations, which embrace Tanzania, Sudan, and Ethiopia, misplaced $9 billion (Sh1.4 trillion) to the web disruptions, which usually lasted for 79,238 hours, an 18 % improve from 2022.

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“This sort of deliberate disruption is web censorship in its most excessive type. Not solely do these web outages infringe on residents’ digital rights however they’re additionally acts of nationwide financial self-harm,” remarked Top10VPN’s digital rights lead Samuel Woodhams and their head of analysis, Simon Migliano, in a joint assertion.

Final yr was the primary time a social media outage was reported in Kenya. Web has usually been uninterrupted within the nation, even in 2022 when elections had been held. Elections is among the frequent causes for web censorships globally.

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