Iran’s Internet Blackout: Peering into The World’s Worst Internet Shutdown

Summary

Internet analyst Doug Madory examines Iran’s ongoing internet blackout, now one of the largest government-directed communication shutdowns in history, and shows how limited connectivity is being selectively restored for a privileged few.

The ongoing internet shutdown in Iran has lasted more than 48 days, the longest national internet shutdown since Libya’s nearly six-month blackout during the Arab Spring in 2011. With a population 15 times as large as Libya’s in 2011, this shutdown is arguably the largest government-directed communication outage in history.

Along with the sheer number of people cut off from the world, what makes this shutdown unique is Iran’s use of an elaborate system to selectively allow internet access for some favored individuals and organizations, while blocking the internet for everyone else, a practice referred to as either whitelisting or a tiered internet.

In this post, I use Kentik’s unique traffic data to analyze the residual traffic we continue to see flowing into Iran while most of the population is completely cut off.

A Year of Disruptions

The graphic below shows the latest plot of traffic into Iran in 2026. It captures the first internet shutdown of the year, beginning on January 8th in response to widespread protests about economic conditions, which I covered in a post here. After about 10 days, the shutdown began to ease, and Iran’s internet entered a new phase of partial restoration. During that phase, connectivity was limited and unstable, and content filtering was erratic and constantly changing.

Then, in response to US and Israeli airstrikes on February 28th, the Iranian government once again took down the internet in a shutdown that continues today.

While only a fraction of normal traffic levels, the volume of whitelisted traffic into Iran, illustrated below, has been slowly growing in the past month. In recent weeks, the Iranian government has been expanding its program of selectively authorizing access to certain individuals and companies.

How does the ongoing shutdown compare to the January shutdown?

To help put the current shutdown in context, we can use our observed traffic levels to compare it to the shutdown earlier this year. Let’s take a look at the aggregate traffic stats.

Initial drops in traffic

Iran’s first shutdown of 2026 began at 16:30 UTC on January 8th, while the current shutdown began at 07:06 UTC on February 28th. If we align the two drops in traffic, we arrive at the following graphic. It shows traffic to Iran at a higher level on January 8th (red) than it was on February 28th (blue), due to the partial restoration.

First 10 days of both shutdowns

The graphic below compares the relative traffic levels of the first ten days of the two shutdowns. In the initial days of the January shutdown (red), almost no traffic was passed into Iran because a broad system of whitelisting had not yet been put in place. By the time the second shutdown occurred, the residual traffic level was significantly higher due to the exceptions put in place to allow favored individuals to maintain internet access.

Note: Traffic plots at the national level are typically fairly smooth. The jagged nature of these plots comes from the paucity of traffic data, combined with the erratic nature of the state of connectivity into Iran.

First 10 days of January vs last 30 days

The trend of higher traffic levels during the ongoing shutdown has continued and is exhibiting steady growth, and Iran’s system of whitelisting traffic is becoming more widely adopted. The graphic below illustrates the vast difference in traffic levels between the ten days of complete shutdown in January (red) and a recent span of similar time during the ongoing shutdown (blue), which is orders of magnitude larger.

Drifting Towards Digital Apartheid

The Iranian government’s rationale for cutting internet access has shifted across three phases, though the effect on citizens has remained constant. Authorities first severed access on January 8th to suppress nationwide protests, started easing restrictions on January 18th, then took the internet down again when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes began on February 28th.

Each time, the official justification was national security: denying adversaries intelligence and blunting cyberattacks. But as Sara Bazoobandi argues, the blackout never limited adversaries’ military capabilities in any meaningful way. What it did, reliably and deliberately, was cut citizens off from the outside world and conceal atrocities.

The wartime framing gave the government more plausible cover, but its own statements revealed a different logic. An Iranian government spokesperson announced in early March that internet access was being provided to those who can “carry the voice of the government further” — an open admission that connectivity was allocated as a reward for loyalty, not for security. Officials, state media figures, and regime allies received unfiltered access through “white SIM cards,” while 90 million ordinary Iranians were left with a degraded domestic intranet.

Tehran University sociologist Javadi Yeganeh complained that the internet restrictions are “discriminatory and humiliating,” particularly because some people (especially military officials and diplomats) enjoy full access during wartime, even though they would seem to be the more likely targets of cyberattacks.

While millions of Iranians remain cut off from the global internet, several major state-backed telecom operators have begun officially selling “Pro Internet” SIM cards offering unfiltered, uninterrupted international access to a limited group, further undercutting the cyberdefense justification for the shutdown.

This week, Iran’s Ministry of ICT announced that, “negotiations are underway to reopen IPs related to essential public needs,” implying that certain businesses would be granted access to the internet in order to continue to operate. In a recent Op-Ed addressing the shutdown, Iran’s Communications Minister acknowledged that around 10 million Iranians depend on the digital economy.

A growing list of exceptions to the blackout can serve to relieve pressure on the Iranian government to lift the internet shutdown. If they poke enough holes in the digital curtain for those who express political loyalty and have economic status, it could become a new normal for connectivity in Iran. Opening the internet to only a privileged few creates a situation that the Iran Human Rights Monitor has termed Digital Apartheid.

The slow but steady increase in traffic to Iran in recent weeks may be evidence of this new reality taking shape.

Special thanks to Iranian digital rights expert Amir Rashidi, Director of Digital Rights and Security at the human rights organization Miaan Group along with experts from Project Ainita for their inputs on this post.