When we lose access to a social network for a few minutes or even an hour, it’s annoying but hardly the end of the world, right? It could be the end for some companies, though, and could have a far-reaching impact on other people on the platform—and the economy as a whole. To understand this better, UK-based Merchant Machine, a site for comparing merchant terminals, did some research into how much companies and countries rely on the internet, and how the loss of it for an hour, 10 hours, or a whole day might impact their revenue.
The chart above gives you the numbers on how the loss would stack up, per country, over 24 hours, but the interactive version below lets you click through to see the basis of that because of a 10-hour or 1-hour internet outage. It also indicates how many internet users there are per country.
Even though China has almost three times as many internet users as the United States, US dependence on the internet is clearly higher—we’d lose about $1.4 billion more than China in a 24-hour internet outage. India’s user base also eclipses that of the US, but the revenue loss for that country is only (“only”!) $1 billion for 24 hours, putting it in eighth place. The numbers for loss of revenue per hour follow suit. The US economy would be out $303 million for every hour there’s a country-wide internet eclipse.
Look at the worldwide revenue for the biggest internet companies. Amazon’s desire to be one with the internet has paid off handsomely. So many people use it for not only buying stuff but for keeping their own web presence afloat. But a 24-hour outage would cost the company over $1 billion. Comparatively, Google’s parent, Alphabet, would lose only half as much. Merchant Machine extrapolated it out to a full year (the kind of internet outage you get with a real dystopian apocalypse), and Amazon’s losses would add up to $386 billion.
Just a single minute of a worldwide internet disruption would set Amazon back by $734,399. We don’t have the US number for the full top 10, only the cost in pounds sterling, but the remainder of the list includes ByteDance (owner of Tiktok) at number 8, Netflix at number 9, and PayPal in 10th place.
The methodology: Merchant Machine took a company’s yearly revenue to see how much it would lose in that time, divided it by day, then divided that by 24 hours, then again by 60 to calculate to the minute. For each country, it used the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) provided by Netblocks.org/cost. Read the full report at Merchant Machine.
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