UN report: 2.9B people, or 37% of the world's population, have never used the internet, while internet users rose from 4.1B in 2019 to 4.9B in 2021
But the pandemic has fueled a rapid surge of worldwide internet users. — Alerts — Nearly two-thirds of the world's population …
Context & Ripple Effects
The UN's tally closes a decade-long measurement arc: when the ITU counted 3.2B people online in 2015, it flagged that mobile broadband had already overtaken home connections as the on-ramp, and Facebook's parallel State of Connectivity report showed annual growth of only ~200M users. The pandemic broke that cadence, adding roughly 800M users in two years.
The report also marks the moment the growth story starts to bend: the US had already plateaued by 2018 per Pew, China crossed its own 1B-user milestone months before this report, and GSMA's later count of 4.6B mobile-internet users confirmed the remaining pool of easy-to-connect people was shrinking fast.
First-order effects
- Mobile operators and platform companies that spent the 2010s acquiring first-time users now face a market where 4.9B are online but 2.9B remain untouched — the pandemic pulled forward demand that would otherwise have taken years to convert.
Second-order effects
- With mature markets saturated (US adult usage flat since 2016) and China past 1B users, operators' growth shifts from subscriber acquisition in connected regions to the expensive last third — coverage economics move toward cheaper devices, shared access points, and subsidized data rather than network builds alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — GSMA already recorded mobile subscriber growth falling to 160M/year by 2023 — the industry's center of gravity moves from adding users to monetizing existing ones, and the offline 37% becomes a policy problem (digital-divide regulation, public funding) more than a commercial one.
The trend: Global internet adoption is transitioning from a decade of rapid first-time-user growth to a saturation phase where the remaining offline population is progressively harder and costlier to connect.