The 2.2 billion gap: who the web still does not reach
Who is still offline in 2026, which languages they speak, and why an English-only web leaves most of the world out of the room.
The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, counts roughly 2.2 billion people still offline in 2025. That is about one human being in four. Ninety-six out of every hundred of them live in low or middle income countries. The gap is not a rounding error. It is a generation of would-be doctors, shopkeepers, farmers, and students who cannot open a web browser today.
The gap is not only about a missing cable. It is also about language. Most of the web speaks English first. A large share of sites speak only English. The languages carried by smaller communities are often left out at the design stage, even when the translation would cost almost nothing.
We built this site in fourteen languages on day one. The set covers Arabic and Urdu as right-to-left scripts. It also covers Bengali, Hindi, Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba, Simplified Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, and English. Each one is in the top twenty by speaker count. Each one is under-served by English-only tools.
Shipping in one language is faster. It is also a quiet decision about who is allowed to be a customer. We chose the wider circle. Every new product in the family follows the same rule: fourteen languages on day one, or the product does not launch.
If you read a page here and the translation reads awkwardly, please tell us. Real readers across the world are part of our editing team. That is how the language floor keeps rising.