01 June 2026
We will remove the NetLoss Calculator from the main navigation and from pages where we automatically pull in its calculations at the country level. It will also be deprecated on the Pulse API for Netloss. Measuring the economic impact of shutdowns is important, and that’s why it needs to be as accurate as possible.
Other Updates
Removing links to the NetLoss Calculator
We released the NetLoss Calculator in June 2023 to measure the impact of Internet shutdowns on a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Measuring impact in this way is important for advocacy, especially with governments, and it’s increasingly common as part of media reporting on shutdowns. Since its release, we’ve refreshed the underlying data every year and generated updated coefficients to calculate the cost.
But recently, our calculator is generating results that appear significantly lower than we would expect, and far lower than what others are producing. For example, using it to measure the cost in Iran, NetLoss yields a total of $1 million per day, but figures reported in the media are between $30 and $40 million. It’s always difficult to estimate cost, even using measures developed by and for econometrics, but this is a very large disparity.
The Pulse team is investigating the cause and we’re exploring alternative data sets. In the meantime, we are removing the Calculator from the main navigation, and we will no longer include automatic calculations on country pages and shutdown incident pages.
The calculator will still be live, so any links to it won’t break, but we advise caution in its usage.