The Future of Iran’s Internet Is More Uncertain Than Ever
For more For six days, nearly 90 million Iranians have been living in a total Internet blackout. The shutdown comes after Iranians suffered a similar total internet blackout in early January, followed by weeks of limited connectivity as the regime brutally attacked and killed thousands of anti-government protesters. But as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran escalates, the conflict adds a new dimension to what would otherwise be a damaging, but not unprecedented, internet outage.
In these situations, and by the design of the regime, the population still has access to the country’s intranet and suite of applications, known as the National Information Network or NIN, so that daily life can continue. Iranians have now also developed and refined a strategy to stay online as much as possible when the Iranian regime restricts connectivity, using VPNs and other proxy networks to access the global Internet. Although many of these workaround tools still work, at least to some extent, during partial outages, they are not accessible during total shutdowns. As is often the case, only the Iranian government, military, and wealthy elites currently have access to the outside Internet, plus a small group of additional gateways that obtain Internet access from Starlink terminals.
Iranians were plunged into internet darkness almost immediately after U.S. and Israeli missiles struck the country on February 28, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Since then, says Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at monitoring company Kentik, “minimal traffic” has left the country, with all networks seeing a traffic drop of about 99 percent. “It is understood that there is a whitelist allowing this [remaining] traffic needs to be routed, either for someone with privileged status or for technical reasons such as updating encryption certificates,” he says.
But even this fragment of connectivity is not immune to wartime disruption. “Given the limited connectivity that remains, several networks have experienced additional outages,” Madory says, adding that technical outages caused by the airstrikes on Iran are likely to blame. Georgia Tech’s internet monitoring project IODA also reported “damage to critical internet or power infrastructure,” knocking Iranian networks offline. “Even if the government shutdown were lifted, connectivity issues could persist due to infrastructure damage. The shutdown obscures our ability to understand the true state of connectivity in Iran,” says Madory.
Over the past decade, the Iranian regime has developed the technical infrastructure, laws, and surveillance apparatus necessary to digitally repress its citizens. Multiple internet shutdowns in 2019, 2022, 2025 and now twice this year have demonstrated more sophisticated blocking techniques. With each internet shutdown, Iranians are cut off from loved ones, unable to access accurate information, and silenced when trying to obtain evidence of regime abuses or potential war crimes outside the country.
As Iran’s control and censorship has intensified over the years, Iran has developed NIN and its internal suite of applications as a solution to allow daily life in Iran to continue and keep the economy running when global connectivity is disabled. Iranian digital rights group Filterwatch says that during the current shutdown it has seen the government promote a national search engine as part of the country’s intranet. The group also claims to have observed the government sending text messages warning that people connecting to the global internet could face legal action.
NIN platforms are centers of surveillance and control of information in general. Experts say the intranet’s “authoritarian network design” creates tiered access in Iran, where global connectivity can be selectively provided to elites, tech companies, universities or other institutions, and not the general population.
