When the world’s first internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia, first opened its doors in London’s West End in September 1994, its founders could never have imagined what they’d unleashed.
Internet cafes — cheap, accessible venues where just about anyone could explore cyberspace in its infancy — spread slowly across the world at first, and then snowballed in popularity. In the spring of 1996, Sri Lanka got its first two internet cafes: the Cyber Cafe, and the Surf Board. A few months later, Kuwait’s first internet cafe launched with 16 PCs. In 1999, a travel guide promised readers a list of 2,000 cafes in 113 countries.
Within a couple years, it was estimated that there were more than 100 internet cafes in Ghana alone. BusyInternet opened the largest internet cafe in Accra, boasting 100 screens. By 2002, there were more than 200,000 licensed internet cafes in China, and still more operating under the table.
“They were mushrooming,” Ricardo Gomez, an associate professor at the University of Washington who conducted a definitive survey of public internet access in the late 2000s, told Rest of World.
Internet cafes were more than just places to log on. They emerged in the waning years of the 20th century — a post-Cold War moment full of techno-optimism. Sharing a global resource like the internet “was going to bring different people in different cultures together in mutual understanding,” historian and author Margaret O’Mara told Rest of World. It was an era in which, both physically and digitally, “people were moving across borders that before were very difficult, if not impossible, to cross.”
For many, internet cafes represented the arrival of the future. “The first day I entered, I didn’t believe it,” a university student in Accra said about stepping into BusyInternet. “I didn’t believe it was Ghana.”
Teenagers met in internet cafes to evade parental surveillance; students used them as study halls. Relationships, both digital and IRL, came to life inside internet cafes; scammers transformed them into the headquarters of international crime rings. Travelers and migrants logged on to reconnect with families and friends in distant time zones. Very few people ever bought coffee at internet cafes.
By the 2010s, though, it was clear that internet cafes were in decline. The writing had been on the wall for years. In 2004, a Guardian article predicted that the launch of 3G meant that internet cafes “will become an increasingly rare sight, a logging-in point for students and tourists.” The launch of the iPhone and the advent of cheap data were just two more nails in the coffin.
In response, some internet cafes, particularly in Asia, reinvented themselves as gaming cafes. Customers crammed into neon-lit dens for hours — even days — binging games like World of Warcraft. Alarming accounts emerged: In Taiwan, one man died after three straight days of gaming; in Japan, thousands of so-called “internet cafe refugees” depended on 24-hour cafes for shelter every night. One woman in China gave birth in an internet cafe’s restroom. The South Korean government cracked down on gaming dens with new restrictions in 2010; the Chinese government shut down thousands regularly.
Internet cafe empires crumbled quickly. In 2013, a Rwandan cafe owner reported that his daily customer count had suddenly dropped from 200 to just 10. India lost more than half of its 200,000 internet cafes between 2005 and 2016. Accra’s BusyInternet cafe folded, and the company pivoted to be an internet service provider. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which wiped out many of the internet cafes that were just barely holding on.
In their disappearance, internet cafes took with them a sense of community, and signaled the end of a simpler time. “What was lost is the gathering space for in-person gathering and hanging out — the communal sharing of food, sharing a dream, being together in the same space,” Gomez said.
Of course, not all the cafes are gone. Around the world, a few hang on — out of a sense of duty, inertia, or simply because there’s still money to be made.
Rest of World set out to document these spaces before they vanished. These are some of the world’s last internet cafes.
