Iran is losing an estimated $1.56 million every hour because of its state-imposed internet blackout, draining its struggling economy and disrupting life for more than 90 million people, according to an internet privacy analyst.

The prolonged disruptions originated amid spiraling protests through January with losses he claimed were continuing even after partial connectivity was restored.

"The current blackout is costing Iran an estimated $37.4 million per day, or $1.56 million every hour," Simon Migliano, head of research at PrivacyCo, told Fox News Digital. "The full internet blackout itself cost Iran more than $780 million, and the subsequent strict filtering continues to have a significant additional economic impact."

"Iran has already drained $215 million from its economy in 2025 by disrupting internet access," the internet privacy and security analyst added.

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Migliano said his estimates were calculated using the NetBlocks COST tool, an economic model that measures the immediate impact on a nation’s gross domestic product when its digital economy is forced offline.

The model assesses direct losses to productivity, online transactions and remote work, drawing on data from the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat and the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Iranian authorities abruptly cut off communications on the night of Jan. 8 amid widespread protests against the clerical regime.

While officials later restored much of the country’s domestic bandwidth, as well as local and international phone calls and SMS messaging, the population is largely unable to freely access the internet because of heavy state filtering.

"The recent 579% surge in VPN demand reflects a scramble for digital survival," Migliano said before describing how even when access is briefly restored, the internet remains "heavily censored and effectively unusable without circumvention tools such as VPNs."

"We can see spikes showing that as soon as connectivity returned, users immediately sought VPNs to reach sites and services outside the state-controlled network, including global platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram that remain otherwise inaccessible," he added.

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"Sustained demand — averaging 427% above normal levels — indicates Iranians are stockpiling circumvention tools in anticipation of further blackouts," Migliano said.

"The usual strategy is to download as many free tools as possible and cycle between them. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game, as the government blocks individual VPN servers and providers rotate IP addresses to stay ahead of the censors," he added.

Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, Sattar Hashemi, acknowledged the economic toll caused by the blackout tactics.

He said recent outages were inflicting roughly "5,000 billion rials" a day in losses to the digital economy and nearly 50 trillion rials on the wider economy, according to Iran International.

"Iran’s three-week internet blackout may have been lifted, but connectivity remains severely disrupted still," Migliano claimed.

"Access is still heavily filtered. It is restricted to a government-approved ‘whitelist’ of sites and apps and the connection itself remains highly unstable throughout the day," he added.

Members of Iran’s ruling elite are said to have moved "tens of millions of dollars" out of the country as the U.S. imposed fresh sanctions over the regime’s violent protest crackdown, according to reports.

The regime's "capital flight" came as the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced on Jan. 15 in a release that it was taking "action against the shadow banking networks that allow Iran’s elite to steal and launder revenue generated by the country’s natural resources."

"There are several reports, some of which are yet to be confirmed, about capital flight in various forms from the Islamic Republic," Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital.

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If confirmed, Ben Taleblu said, the suspected exodus of money underscores the need for U.S. authorities to track and "freeze and seize" assets tied to sanctioned figures.

"If capital flight has taken place, then these are accounts that the U.S. government should be looking to monitor, block, freeze and seize," he said.

"At the direction of President Trump, the Treasury Department is sanctioning key Iranian leaders involved in the brutal crackdown against the Iranian people. Treasury will use every tool to target those behind the regime’s tyrannical oppression of human rights," Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent also said in a statement on Jan. 15.

Bessent went on to reveal in an interview how his department had tracked the wiring of "tens of millions of dollars" out of Iran by leaders.

"We are now seeing the rats fleeing the ship, because we can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership," Bessent added.

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"So they are abandoning ship, and we are seeing it come into banks and financial institutions all over the world," he added.

Iranian figures were said to be moving large sums abroad, with Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei allegedly transferring roughly $328 million overseas as part of an estimated $1.5 billion shift in recent days, Channel 14 reported.

"There were also some reports on social media about large volumes of Bitcoin being transferred, or other kinds of financial assets. I haven’t been able to independently confirm that, but it is something that’s being discussed," Ben Taleblu added.

"The fact that the Treasury Department is looking at this tells you quite seriously that Washington is also trying to link its foreign economic policy with its national security policy," he said.

Ben Taleblu also claimed Iran’s shadow banking system has been deeply embedded in global finance, with billions of dollars routed through jurisdictions "including the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Singapore."

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"In the past, Washington has tracked the regime’s shadow banking activities, which, unfortunately, even include trade and money laundering through friendlier, more Western-leaning jurisdictions," Ben Taleblu explained.

"In fact, the Treasury Department identified almost $9 billion of Iranian shadow banking activity that touched U.S. correspondent accounts throughout 2024," he said.

Ben Taleblu added that the economic pressure campaign places renewed attention on President Donald Trump’s next move.

"All eyes right now are on President Trump to see if he takes a page from the Reagan playbook, the Obama playbook, or something else entirely," Ben Taleblu said.

"The million-dollar question is whether there will be something kinetic, especially after the most violent crackdown against protesters in the Islamic Republic’s history."

"Economic sanctions are helpful and necessary," he added, "but they are nowhere near sufficient to level the playing field between the street and the state."