What happens when the internet goes dark?

The internet has become so embedded in economic life that losing it can bring entire areas of economic activity to a halt. Payment terminals stop authorizing purchases, businesses are cut off from cloud software, ports struggle to access logistics platforms, and governments can lose the digital systems used to deliver services. 

Connectivity can fail for remarkably different reasons, and disruptions are far from exceptional. Cloudflare, which monitors internet traffic through its global network, recorded more than 180 internet disruptions in 2025, ranging from cable cuts and power failures to military action, extreme weather and technical problems. Iran demonstrated the scale a blackout can reach in 2026. A nationwide shutdown imposed on Feb. 28 as military strikes on the country escalated left Iran almost entirely offline for 88 days, with traffic initially falling to well under 1 percent of previous levels, according to Cloudflare.

The economic damage can persist long after connectivity returns, delaying production and interrupting supply chains.While few modern economies can escape the effects of a prolonged blackout, the severity of the shock depends on where an economy has concentrated its digital dependencies and how many credible alternatives remain when they fail.

When payments stop

Commerce is among the first places where connectivity failure becomes tangible. A shop may have electricity, employees, and customers but still be unable to sell anything if its card terminal cannot reach the servers required to process a transaction.

The IMF’s working paper Operational Resilience in Digital Payments warns that outages affecting telecom networks, messaging systems or shared cloud providers can disrupt bank payment instructions and central bank settlement. Electronic payments also depend on uninterrupted electricity.

The same blackout can therefore produce radically different economic shocks from one country to another. A cash-heavy economy may preserve day-to-day commerce while losing remittances and mobile money. A highly digitized economy may have stronger infrastructure but far more commerce dependent on cards, cloud services and online authentication.

In East Africa, where mobile connectivity underpins commerce, outages can disrupt mobile payments, online trade and government services, according to a World Bank report on climate-resilient digital infrastructure in the Horn of Africa. The report cites modeling by internet monitor NetBlocks estimating that a nationwide shutdown in Kenya could cost about $1.2 million in GDP every two hours.

Four ways to go offline

Connectivity can fail at several points, each exposing a different vulnerability. Governments can order networks offline, war can destroy telecommunications infrastructure, earthquakes or ship anchors can sever submarine cables, while data center and cloud failures can disable services even when the internet itself remains connected.

Deliberate shutdowns provide the largest pool of documented cases. Access Now, a digital rights organization, and its #KeepItOn coalition of more than 345 civil society groups documented 313 shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, up from 304 in 2024 and 289 in 2023. At least 52 occurred across 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Physical failures create a different problem. The 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano destroyed 80 kilometers of Tonga’s sole international submarine cable, cutting the country’s main connection to the outside world for five weeks. Damage to its domestic inter-island cable took another 18 months to repair.

Iran offers a particularly extreme example. The country experienced two nationwide shutdowns in the first months of 2026. During the first, beginning Jan. 8, traffic remained near zero for almost two weeks before brief restorations began. A second shutdown began on Feb. 28 amid escalating military strikes, pushing traffic to well under 1 percent of previous levels. The restrictions turned connectivity from an everyday utility into an economic constraint affecting businesses, payments and communication across the country. 

The economy behind the cloud

Some failures can cause widespread disruption without severing internet connectivity. In October 2025, problems in Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia region affected websites and applications relying on the facility. Nine days later, an incident involving Microsoft Azure’s content delivery network disrupted services for its customers.

Data centers themselves depend on physical inputs, including electricity, cooling equipment and functioning telecommunications links. A failure in one layer can therefore move into systems that appear unrelated. The May 2026 report published by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and Sciences Po, found that as much as 89 percent of digital service disruptions caused by natural hazards can arise from secondary ripple effects rather than direct physical damage.

Digital dependence becomes most dangerous when an essential service has nowhere else to go. Multiple international cable routes, geographically dispersed data centers and independent backup systems can contain an outage. Dependence on a single cable, cloud region or provider can instead spread one failure across payments, communications and commerce.

Preparing to work offline

Keeping an economy functioning through a prolonged blackout requires more than emergency power. Businesses and governments need ways to take payments, retrieve records and coordinate operations when digital systems are unavailable.

The May 2026 report warns that analogue skills and fallback options have disappeared or gone untested across many sectors, leaving manual alternatives unable to replace digital systems during prolonged failures.

Lebanon offers a useful test of this problem. According to ITU data published by the World Bank, 81 percent of Lebanon’s population used the internet in 2024, even as cash remains central to everyday commerce and businesses have long experience operating around electricity shortages. Generators can keep a shop, office or telecommunications facility powered, but they cannot restore an international cable or reconnect a business to a cloud platform abroad.

The longer a blackout lasts, the less it resembles a telecommunications problem. It becomes a payments, trade and logistics crisis, eventually determining whether firms and public institutions can operate at all. The internet going dark reveals, system by system, how much of an economy has become impossible to operate without it.