Iran’s internet shutdown is now one of its longest ever, as protests continue

As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians have been completely blocked from accessing the internet for more than a week, in what is now one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns ever, according to experts.

Last Thursday, Iran’s leadership blocked internet and phone access across the whole country in response to massive anti-government protests, which began at the end of last year and have prompted a brutal and deadly crackdown from authorities. 

As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for more than 170 hours. The previous longest shutdowns in the country lasted around 163 hours in 2019, and 160 hours in 2025, according to Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a web monitoring company that tracks internet disruptions. 

Mater said that the current shutdown in Iran is the third longest on record, after the internet shutdown in Sudan in mid-2021 that lasted around 35 days, followed by the outage in Mauritania in July 2024, which lasted 22 days. 

“Iran’s shutdowns remain among the most comprehensive and tightly enforced nationwide blackouts we’ve observed, particularly in terms of population affected,” Mater told TechCrunch. 

The exact ranking depends on how each organization measures a shutdown. 

Zach Rosson, a researcher who studies internet disruptions at the digital rights nonprofit AccessNow, told TechCrunch that according to its data, the ongoing shutdown in Iran is on a path to crack the top ten longest shutdowns in history. 

Iran’s government has a long track record of shutting down access to the internet at times of protest and civil unrest, often making it more difficult to monitor the protests from outside of the country. 

A U.S.-based human rights group estimates that there have been more than 600 protests in cities across Iran, and according to one estimate, the Iranian government’s violent crackdown has led to the deaths of at least 2,000 people.

The shutdown in Iran on January 8 was sudden, cutting government institutions like the foreign ministry from the internet. Since then, some government departments, and some parts of the economy, such as bank transfers and payment processors at gas stations, had their access restored, as The Financial Times reported this week.

According to The Guardian, a relatively small but unknown number of Iranians have been using Starlink terminals smuggled into the country to connect to the internet. In 2022, the Biden administration carved an exemption to the U.S. government’s sanctions against Iran to “increase support for internet freedom,” and allow U.S. tech companies to provide connectivity to Iranians for free, paving the way for Starlink to operate in Iran. 

Authorities have since cracked down on Starlink users by making it illegal to own a Starlink terminal, jamming entire neighborhoods, and confiscating the devices.

This week, President Donald Trump threatened military intervention if Iranian forces continue to use violence, all the while reducing personnel at a military base in neighboring Qatar, amid concerns of a possible retaliatory strike. The U.S. military also reportedly redirected a naval strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East. 

On Wednesday, however, Trump said he had information that “the killing has stopped and the executions won’t take place,” but conceded that, “who knows?”

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom shuttered its embassy in Iran’s capital Tehran and evacuated its staff. Iran temporarily closed off its airspace on Wednesday.