For 19 days, the majority of Iran’s 92 million people have been cut off from the outside world, according to watchdog groups that track internet censorship in the country, as the country’s regime has tried to suppress communication and maintain control over its population during wartime.
As U.S. and Israeli airstrikes continue across Iran for the third week, the state has imposed a near-total internet blockade for most Iranians while increasingly criminalizing and shutting down alternate methods of connecting to the web. The few workarounds available (international call packages, private network connections or Starlink) are becoming riskier, pricier and less reliable by the day.
“Based on traffic levels, I would expect that about 99 percent of Iranians do not have regular access to the internet,” said Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that measures internet network performance.
Most domestic websites and internet-based services like bank or ride-sharing apps continued to run normally for the first two weeks of the war, but some started experiencing disruptions about four days ago. Some domestic services, including a government-approved “super app” similar to China’s WeChat, became temporarily inaccessible inside Iran over the weekend.
“These types of disruptions can result from changes in routing, the implementation of stricter filtering policies or efforts to centralize traffic control,” said Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert with the digital-rights group Miaan. “But in practice, such measures often lead to cascading failures that affect even domestic services.”
The Islamic republic has a history of stifling connection to the outside world in times of crisis, including during the deadly crackdown on antigovernment protests in January and during the 12-day war with Israel last year. The January internet blackout was clearly intended to subdue protests. This blackout has had the effect of isolating Iranians and cutting them off from information.
“Overall, this situation benefits no one,” Mr. Rashidi, the cybersecurity expert, explained. “In the long run, it weakens the entire digital ecosystem in the country. That’s why such measures are often better understood as tools of control rather than as effective, technical responses to cyberthreats.”
One resident in Tehran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation by the Iranian authorities, said that most people could not even see U.S. and Israeli evacuation warnings posted online, and had no precise understanding of developments in the war, including which areas or sites were under attack.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, defended the blackout in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, saying that the internet had been shut down “because of security reasons” and that “in any country, there are urgent measures taken for the sake of war.” He spoke via Zoom — a platform inaccessible to most Iranians — prompting the interviewer to note the disparity. “I’m the voice of Iranians,” Mr. Araghchi said, “and I have to defend their right.”
Fatemeh Shams, an Iranian poet and professor living in exile in Philadelphia, watched the stream of voices of people she knows inside Iran slow to a trickle by the third day of the war. “The ordinary people cannot document what is happening to them,” she said by phone. “Iranians are facing two wars: one external and one internal war with the regime through the information siege.”
Incoming international calls have also been blocked, making it more difficult for people inside the country to connect with families and friends abroad. But making international calls from Iran is unaffordable for many people.
“My mom calls me directly on a landline every day for just two minutes to let me know she’s safe,” said Sarah, who lives in Europe and asked that only her first name be used because she feared for the safety of family members who remain in Tehran. After nearly three weeks of war, she said, her mother’s phone bill has racked up, but she keeps paying it because she’s scared her line might otherwise get disconnected.
Some Iranians, especially younger ones who rely on the internet for work and socializing, have turned to unreliable and expensive virtual private networks, or VPNs, to evade the nationwide blackout. On some Telegram channels and Iran’s domestic apps, sellers openly advertise VPN configurations at prices ranging from 300,000 to 1.5 million Iranian tomans per gigabyte of data — what the average household spends on food for several days.
Eman, an information technology expert based in Iran who asked that only his first name be used because he feared retaliation, said the black market for VPN configurations had exploded since the blackout began. But these VPNs are easily traceable by the government and can stop working at any moment.
Once identified, an IP address can be blocked within hours. The same configuration may work on one phone model and fail on another, he added, and effectiveness varies by city and by neighborhood, and sometimes by the hour.
Starlink-based configurations, which connect to the internet via satellite, are the most reliable. But they are prohibitively expensive for most Iranians, and they carry the highest risk. The authorities have been searching for Starlink dishes, which usually must be installed on roofs, and arresting individuals who have them.
HRANA, an Iranian rights group based in Washington, reported that several residents had been arrested in Iran’s Fars and Lorestan provinces on charges such as selling “unfiltered internet via Starlink,” sending images to an international news organization and espionage.
Accounts on X for Iran’s president, foreign minister and state-affiliated news agencies, meanwhile, have been posting statements seemingly without interruption (X is mostly inaccessible to those inside the country).
Some government-approved officials are also assigned “white SIM cards,” which can bypass all filtering and connect directly to the global internet without any workarounds. But this weekend, cybersecurity experts observed disruptions even within this state-approved connection system when some white SIM cards stopped working.
Journalists inside Iran face heightened risks when trying to connect with people outside Iran or to document the toll of the war. Iran’s Ministry of Culture has restricted press credentials, leaving many reporters to work without authorization or not at all.
The country’s police chief, Gen. Ahmadreza Radan, issued a warning last week against filming damaged sites and told state TV over the weekend that 500 people had been detained, half of them for sending information and images to “enemy countries.”
Parin Behrooz is an associate editor and writer for The New York Times.
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