For more than six days, almost 90 million Iranians have been living under a total internet blackout. The shutdown comes after Iranians endured a similar total internet blackout at the beginning of January, followed by weeks of limited connectivity while the regime brutally attacked and killed thousands of anti-government protesters. But as the US and Israel’s war on Iran intensifies, the conflict is adding a new dimension to what would otherwise be a damaging but not unprecedented internet blackout.
In these situations, and by the regime’s design, the populace still has access to the country’s homegrown intranet and suite of applications, known as the National Information Network or NIN, so daily life can continue. Iranians have by now also built and refined a playbook for staying online as much as possible when the Iranian regime restricts connectivity, using VPNs and other proxy networks to access the global internet. While many of those circumvention tools still work, at least to a degree, during partial blackouts, they aren’t accessible during total shutdowns. As is often the case, only the Iranian government, military, and wealthy elites currently have access to the outside internet, along with a small group of additional gateways that get internet access from Starlink terminals.
Iranians were plunged into internet darkness almost immediately after US and Israeli missiles hit the country on February 28, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Since then, says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik, there has been “minimal traffic” leaving the country, with all networks seeing around 99 percent drops in traffic. “The understanding is that there is some whitelisting allowing that [remaining] traffic to pass, either for an individual with favored status or for some technical rationale like updating encryption certificates,” he says.
But even this sliver of connectivity is not immune from wartime disruption. “Within the limited connectivity that remains, multiple networks have experienced additional outages,” Madory says, adding that technical failures caused by air strikes on Iran are likely responsible. Georgia Tech’s internet monitoring project, IODA, has also reported “damage to critical internet or power infrastructure” knocking Iranian networks offline. “Even if the government shutdown were lifted, connectivity problems could persist due to infrastructure damage. The shutdown masks our ability to understand the true state of connectivity in Iran,” Madory says.
Over the past decade, the Iranian regime has built out the technical infrastructure, laws, and surveillance apparatus to digitally suppress its citizens. Multiple internet shutdowns in 2019, 2022, 2025, and now twice this year have demonstrated more sophisticated blocking techniques. With each internet blackout, Iranians have been cut off from loved ones, unable to access accurate news, and silenced when trying to get evidence of regime abuses or potential war crimes out of the country.
As Iran’s control and censorship has intensified over the years, it has developed the NIN and its internal suite of apps as a solution for allowing daily life in Iran to continue and keeping the economy running when global connectivity is turned off. Iranian digital rights group Filterwatch says that during the current shutdown it has seen the government promoting a domestic search engine as part of the country’s intranet. The group also says it has observed the government sending some text messages warning that people connecting to the global internet could face legal action.
NIN platforms are hotbeds of surveillance and information control in general. Experts say that the intranet’s “authoritarian network design” is creating tiered access in Iran, where global connectivity can be provided selectively to elites, tech companies, universities, or other institutions and not the general population.
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