Iran’s longest-ever internet blackout leaves 99% offline: What to know

Iran’s sweeping internet shutdown crossed into unprecedented territory March 20, stretching into its fourth week and surpassing the country’s previous record set in January. The milestone arrives with little relief in sight for ordinary Iranians, with experts seeing a connectivity crunch that could last indefinitely.

The picture is bleak: Nearly all of Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the global internet after authorities pulled the plug within hours after US-Israeli airstrikes began Feb. 28. “We’re currently in the longest shutdown in the history of Iran,” Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring firm Kentik, told Al-Monitor.

While January’s blackout began easing after about 10 days, the current lockdown has kept roughly 99% of the population almost completely offline since the start. But beneath that near-total communications cut lies a more complicated reality, one defined by adaptation, loopholes and a constant struggle between users seeking access and authorities trying to seal it.

The result is not a simple on-off switch but a layered system of control. Since January, Iran has shifted from blocking individual sites to enforcing what is being dubbed a “whitelisted” internet — allowing access only to approved services while walling off the broader web. This has effectively created a two-tier national system that bans access to the global internet for the general population.

That structure has also produced what experts see as “shutdowns within a shutdown,” as even approved access is periodically disrupted when authorities detect workarounds. “Clever people are figuring out a way to sell access to this or share it,” said Madory. “And so the government has kind of picked up on this and started cracking down.”

Those crackdowns have been visible in real time. One of those occurred March 15, when Kentik observed traffic for some whitelisted services drop, suggesting authorities were tightening controls in response to emerging access-sharing networks. This has come alongside other fleeting flickers of restored services, including a brief spike in traffic on March 18 across major residential and mobile networks. “And then it went right back down,” said Madory. “They briefly turned a lot of service back on but then shut it back down.”

Dialing up pressure

The current blackout builds directly on the template established earlier this year. On Jan. 8, amid nationwide protests over collapsing economic conditions, Iran imposed one of the largest communication shutdowns on record, severing both domestic and international connectivity amid a deadly crackdown on unrest.

Traffic began recovering around Jan. 18 and gradually stabilized by Jan. 27, forming a partial restoration baseline for the next month as US-Iran tensions began to boil.

By contrast, the current internet outage has followed a similar structure but without the same relief. Tehran previewed this new censorship style last year during the 12-day June war between Israel and Iran.

Dubbed a “stealth blackout,” the strategy avoids fully disconnecting the country at the infrastructure level — locking out ordinary users while keeping underlying routing largely intact. That’s how regime figures continue utilizing social media and other services that allow them to interact with the outside world.

Cat and mouse

After Iranian authorities pulled the plug Feb. 28, whitelisted platforms — including banking and ride-hailing services — initially remained accessible, though even those have become increasingly unstable, as the New York Times recently reported.

Despite appearances of a near-total shutdown, a closer look at Iran’s networks reveals intermittent dips and spikes. “It’s not binary, like on or off,” Madory said. “There are these subtle levels of ‘off’ that Iran experiences.” Those “levels” reflect a system that is still functioning in fragments, even as authorities attempt to control it.

Within that constrained environment, Iranians have sought ways to exploit gaps. Some obtain access through businesses or institutions granted exemptions; others share or sell that access, creating informal and often expensive black markets for connectivity. “There’s a lot of cat and mouse going on,” Madory said.

Authorities have responded by aggressively closing those gaps. When usage patterns suggest that whitelisted access is being redistributed, connectivity often drops again — creating the “shutdown within a shutdown” dynamic. “They have a system that has these exemptions,” Madory said. “As soon as you create a little bit of a hole, someone can use some ingenuity to figure out how to expand that.”

Searching for Starlink

During January’s shutdown, media attention turned to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service as a potential workaround. Estimates at the time suggested tens of thousands of terminals had been smuggled into the country.

On Feb. 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had covertly smuggled roughly 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iran after the regime’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations the month before, marking the first time the United States had directly sent Starlink into Iran.

In practice, however, the impact has been limited. Even tens of thousands of terminals can serve only a fraction of Iran’s population, and authorities have actively targeted their use through confiscations and signal interference.

Starlink connections are probably the most reliable way to connect out of the country if you have one, Madory said, but “90 million people don’t.”

Even those limited connections face uncertainty. Some devices have stopped working in recent weeks for unclear reasons, Madory said, and users risk arrest if caught with the equipment. On March 17, the state-linked news agency Fars reported that Iranian intelligence authorities had located and confiscated hundreds of banned Starlink devices.

Digital siege

The blackout has left Iranians cut off not only from the outside world but also from each other during a moment of acute national crisis. Amid US and Israeli strikes, many residents lack access to basic information, including evacuation warnings. The communications vacuum has compounded the uncertainty of daily life under bombardment, while also doing lasting damage to the country’s economy and digital businesses.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has defended the measures, saying in a recent Zoom interview with CBS that the “internet is closed because of security reasons” and that any country will take “urgent measures” for the sake of war. So far, that strategy appears to be working, with few signs that ordinary Iranians are poised to rise up from within.

There is also little indication that the blackout will ease in the near term. Even as US-Israeli attacks pound Iran’s infrastructure, it’s unlikely that this campaign can do much to restore broad access or cripple Tehran’s censorship capabilities.

“I don’t think an airstrike is going to turn the internet back on,” Madory said. “As long as this government is in power, then we’re going to have some form of what we’re having right now indefinitely.”