Iran imposed a near-total communications blackout on the third day of nationwide protests in January, then tightened controls further after the conflict with the United States and Israel began on February 28. The shutdown — already the longest in the country’s history — has left most Iranians confined to state-controlled domestic networks and state media.
Cutting or crippling communications is a familiar tactic for the clerical regime. Authorities used similar shutdowns during the 2019 fuel-price unrest, during the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” movement after Jina Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, and again in January as demonstrations spread beyond Tehran. Monitors such as Cloudflare and NetBlocks recorded internet traffic collapsing to almost zero in January, and connectivity has since remained at only a tiny fraction of normal levels amid the current war.
The government defends the blackout on national-security grounds, saying foreign agents and opponents are circulating images and videos of sensitive military and state sites. But the restrictions do far more than limit images: they have crippled businesses, severed families’ communications and trapped much of the population inside a heavily censored national intranet that many Iranians distrust.
A minority still reaches the global web through risky and expensive workarounds. During the January unrest, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service became a lifeline for some users even as authorities attempted to jam signals. As the crackdown intensified, black-market Starlink kits that once cost about $1,000 reportedly rose to more than $5,000. VPN access remains possible but often prohibitively priced; one source told DW they paid up to 1 million tomans per gigabyte for unstable, filtered access. With a minimum monthly wage of roughly 16 million tomans, reliable internet has become a luxury for many.
That gulf in access has prompted one resident to call the situation “a digital apartheid era,” arguing that connectivity now aligns with class and political standing: “If you are university faculty, a pro-government journalist or part of an online propaganda project, you get internet access. If you are rich, you buy an expensive VPN. But if you are ordinary, your share is the national internet and high walls of censorship.”
The economic toll has been severe. Small online sellers who relied on Instagram and messaging apps report orders drying up as customers and suppliers lose connections. Economist Hassan Mansur cited official estimates of roughly $37.7 million in daily losses from the shutdown, with January alone costing an estimated $185 million in lost income tied to Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp. He said about 70% of businesses have been affected and that revenues for online firms have fallen between 50% and 90%, with some companies disappearing entirely.
Tehran promotes its domestic intranet as a solution, but it lacks the large-scale search engines, cloud infrastructure and social platforms that sustain China’s closed internet model. That technological gap, combined with pervasive fear of surveillance and arrests linked to digital activity, has left citizens deeply suspicious of government-backed apps. Digital-rights activists report intelligence agents accessing private chats during arrests; one individual said agents cited messages they had read on WhatsApp while detaining him.
As the global internet has receded for many Iranians, other information channels have narrowed too. Satellite television remains a key source of outside news for some households, though jamming has reduced its reliability. Some Persian-language outlets abroad have revived shortwave radio broadcasts. The return to older communication technologies underscores how censorship can push societies backward while suppressing dissent.
The blackout also shrinks the public sphere: it makes independent verification harder, curtails direct communication between people on the ground and foreign media, and strengthens the state’s ability to impose a single narrative. While authorities insist the shutdown is necessary for national security, many Iranians see the prolonged disruption as evidence that the regime is willing to sacrifice livelihoods, transparency and basic connections to preserve its hold on power.
Edited by Karl Sexton