Iran’s internet shutdown, explained | The Verge

After protests broke out in early January, the Iranian regime shut down the internet, starting the longest blackout in Iranian history. Despite this attempt to stop the protests from spreading, they did not stop. Still, the internet shutdown slowed down the spread of information both inside and outside Iran.

Behind the heavily policed borders and the jammed signals, an unprecedented wave of state violence continues to add to a death toll somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000. Even at the lowest count, which has been acknowledged by the Iranian state and is likely a wild underestimate, these last few weeks have been one of the bloodiest uprisings in modern history.

The situation in Iran can be hard to grasp. The history is complicated; the state of the technology and internet infrastructure there is constantly in flux. To get a sense of what is happening right now, I turned to an expert. Mahsa Alimardani, the associate director of the Technology Threats & Opportunities program at WITNESS, has been a researcher and advocate in the digital rights space — particularly around Iran — since 2012. I spoke with her about what is happening in Iran, and how technology both props up and threatens repressive regimes.

The Verge: What is internet access in Iran like right now?

Mahsa Alimardani: Since the weekend [of January 24], there has been some resumption of connectivity. And I’m a little bit worried that this might convince people that things are back to normal. Last I saw, there was like 30 to 40 percent connectivity on some of the Cloudflare network data in Iran and there’s very inconsistent connectivity. Some circumvention tools have started to work.

Randomly, someone in Iran FaceTime called me yesterday. They were like, “My VPN stopped working, so I just tried to call with FaceTime, and for some reason, it didn’t even need a VPN.” But it was a momentary glitch. Various things are happening across the network, and it’s not really clear why there’s this opening, or what it means for long-term connectivity.

Since January 8th, when there was a surge in the uprising in the protest movement in Iran, there was an internet shutdown — the longest internet shutdown in Iran, they broke the record in length.

They also broke the record in number of protesters that have been massacred. It’s horrifying to think that technology helps enable such crimes.

Why does the Iranian government fear internet access?

In 1988, there was a fatwa where the government massacred a lot of political prisoners in a short span of time. I bring this up because it happened when there was no internet, and the media was heavily controlled and centralized by the state. If you did not flee Iran, and if you were not part of the generation of prisoners and political activists that survived, it was very hard to pass on the memory of that event. Peers of mine in Iran didn’t grow up with the same information. It’s so interesting having these conversations with people and realizing they are learning history only when they leave the country.

What’s been a real game changer is the way you can document and witness these kinds of crimes in the age of the internet. I think it’s obviously a big threat to the regime. It’s a massive threat to them to be able to hold them accountable, and be able to document and witness what they’re doing.

Anytime anyone sees a severe crackdown like an internet shutdown, you know that it’s going to be followed by violence. In 2019 there was a week-long internet shutdown, under the blanket of which they massacred 1,500 people. The reason why is because they don’t want people to use the internet for mobilization and communication, and they don’t want there to be a way to document what’s happening.

So the denial of the scale of their crimes is part of what they do in Iran, because it’s very hard to assess the percentage of legitimacy that the regime has, because obviously you can’t do free polling. You don’t have free media. Even when you have foreign journalists that go there, they’re followed by minders and the reporting is super-limited. The UN hasn’t been able to really have anyone do proper site visits for human rights documentation, since the start of this regime in 1979.

There isn’t any real access to professional on-the-ground documentation and fact-finding. So it all really depends on the internet, on people, on citizen media. People sending things, putting them online, and then having professional fact-checkers and verification.

What was internet access in Iran like most recently? What platforms and service providers did people use before the blackout started?

Iranians are extremely tech savvy because there’s been a cat-and-mouse game across the internet for most of its existence. Since 2017, 2018, on average, there’s been protests every two years. Each time they have a different level of censorship, new kinds of rules and regulations.

In 2017, [messaging app] Telegram was massive. Some people were even saying Telegram was the internet for Iranians, they were doing everything across Telegram. It worked really well, especially with network bandwidth being really low. So Telegram was a place for news, chatting, socializing everything, even like online markets. But then they blocked it in 2018 when protests started, because protest mobilization on there was a threat to the regime.

There was a move toward Instagram and WhatsApp becoming the most popular applications.

They had yet to be blocked back then. Instagram was more for fun, but it became much more politicized after Telegram was blocked. Then, during the Woman Life Freedom movement in 2022, Instagram and WhatsApp got blocked.

Most people are just on VPNs. The regime has spent a lot of effort in trying to disable VPNs. There’s a lot of different VPN projects both for-profit and nonprofit that work within that cat-and-mouse game where protocols are being disabled and new ones are created.

An average Iranian often has many different VPNs. When one can’t work, they’ll turn on another one.

We’ve talked about how technology threatens the regime and how average Iranians use it. Let’s switch over to the other side of this issue: how does technology enable repression?

So there’s various different things the regime does, different levels of enacting information controls. There’s the censorship level of shutting it down.

Then there’s physical coercion. Like, I know people who have not reported their children who have been killed recently because they were so frightened by the process by which they had to get their loved one’s body.

They also flood the information space with a lot of misinformation. They create a lot of doubt.

They’ve been doing this information manipulation even before the internet. Iran is a very complicated information space. There are a lot of actors beyond the regime who also want to manipulate it. Even authentic dissidents and activism will get lumped in with Mossad or CIA operations.

The regime’s campaign existed pre-internet, but with technology, it went into overdrive. They’ve been quite clever in some of the ways they’ve covered the protests. They’ve been able to even mobilize, like, people who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, against, you know, the Iranian cause for liberation.

There have been a lot of documented efforts of them trying to manipulate protest documentation, undermine it, you know, use the concept of the Liar’s Dividend, which is very easy to use in the increasingly AI world we’re in.

Hold on, can you go through those examples you just mentioned? About mobilizing people who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause?

Yeah, so, Iran is quite complicated in that it’s an Islamic fascist state. They use Islam in a lot of ways to repress the people. And there is a lot of very valid rhetoric about Islamophobia in the West, from the very specific context and history of the United States, such as what happened during the War on Terror.

But in Iran, it’s quite different. And this can really be manipulated and conflated, right? Mosques in Iran are often also the headquarters for the Basij [the Iranian paramilitary corps], and people might not know this. So there will be videos like, “Look at these protesters who are setting fire to this mosque. Look at these Islamophobic rioters.”

You might see that, without the context that the mosques also are places where the security forces that kill people are stationed, and lose why something like that would be attacked by Iranians seeking liberation.

You mentioned the regime’s use of AI — do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah, so, we didn’t need AI for authoritarian regimes to deny evidence of their crimes. Even before AI, Bashir al-Assad [the former dictator of Syria] was saying that reliable documentation of his crimes in Syria were not valid.

Whether we like it or not, AI is being integrated into a lot of things. AI editing is slowly becoming ubiquitous. Like, in fact, we might come to a point where editing photos or anything might become unavoidable without the use of generative AI.

So you no longer have that binary of like, if it’s AI, it’s fake. If there’s no AI, it’s real.

So there’s this very symbolic image that everyone has said reminded them of the Tiananmen Square Tank Man from 1989. But here, a protester is standing in front of armed security forces on motorcycles with weapons. [Ed. note: The New York Post ran with the headline “Powerful image of lone Iranian protester in front of security forces draws parallels to Tiananmen Square ‘Tank Man.’”]

This was a very low resolution video taken from a high rise [building]. Someone had screenshotted a frame from the video and it was quite blurry.

They used some AI editing software to enhance it, and you could see some AI artifacts. Nevertheless, this is an authentic, verified image of a brave protester. Lots of credible sources have verified it. But immediately, it was pointed out to have these AI artifacts, and a lot of the regime accounts started this narrative of “This is all AI slop from Zionists.”

And of course, because, you know, Israel has a special interest in Iran, they have a Farsi-language state account. Israel’s Farsi state account shared the image, which further fueled the claim that this authentic image from Iran was AI slop being pushed by the enemy, Israel.

As you’ve already mentioned, Iran has a complicated information environment. What would you say are the various actors in this space? What kinds of things are they doing?

Obviously there are foreign policy interests by Israel and the US in Iran, just because of the history and very antagonistic relationship they’ve had from the very beginning of the revolution.

The Iran-Israel war in June 2025 was a super interesting moment because the war started a few weeks after Google launched Veo 3, which has made access to very realistic generative AI content very easy. So right off the bat, you could see, from both sides, a lot of AI content coming from the war. This wasn’t the first war where that’s happened — like the Ukraine war has had so many different examples — but since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [beginning in 2022], the technology has advanced far more, so it became a very big part of the narrative of the situation in Iran.

The most famous example from the Iran-Israel war was a piece of manipulated content that Citizen Lab later was able to attribute to the Israeli state. It was this AI-generated video of Israel bombing the gates of Evin Prison, perpetuating this narrative that they have very precise military operations and that they were freeing these political prisoners.

Evin is a very famous prison for a lot of activists and dissidents and intellectuals in Iran. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called the bombing of Evin Prison a war crime. And indeed, political prisoners were casualties of the bombing.

But that deepfaked video went viral. Mainstream media even reposted it immediately before a lot of various different researchers, including our deepfakes rapid response force and others, were able to attest that indeed this was a manipulated video.

So you have this information space that is quite complicated. But in this scenario, I think it would really be remiss to put that much emphasis on the role that these other actors have. There are things from these outside actors that fog up the information space, but ultimately what’s really happening is that there’s a really unprecedented massacre happening. And the perpetrator is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I’ve seen some reporting about how Iranians bought Starlink terminals prior to the blackout. Can you say anything about that?

Yeah, I want to start by referencing a really great article by the Sudanese activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied, called “Sudanese People Don’t Have the Luxury of Hating Elon Musk.” Whatever my personal ideas are about Elon Musk, you have to give credit where credit is due. This technology is a game changer. It’s been a game changer in Sudan. And it has been in Iran.

We’ve had a few days of a little bit of connectivity of people coming online just through the ordinary network, but when the shutdown was full and complete, Starlink was really the only window we had into Iran.

And if you talk to documentation organizations, they’ll tell you, they were getting evidence and doing the verification through what was coming in from the Starlink connections. I know of people who had a Starlink and had like a whole neighborhood of people come in to check in and use the Wi-Fi.

The most credible stats before the situation was that there’s about 50,000 Starlinks. There’s likely more than 56,000 now. It became very popular during the Iran-Israel War, because of course, then the Islamic Republic enacted another shutdown. A lot of people invested in getting Starlink then.

You can get anything you want in Iran through smugglers — I think Starlink was like $1,000 at the time because demand was so high. Receivers are ordinarily a few hundred US dollars. The last price I heard was they were being sold for $2,000 in Iran. It’s a lot of money, but given the demand and the massive risk the smugglers have to undertake, I think it’s fair, but also, it means you can’t really scale this, and the people that have it are very privileged or have access to very privileged people.

What we’re seeing is a very small window. When having discussions with various folks that have been doing firsthand documentation, they’ve expressed, “We’re not getting enough from Kurdistan. We’re not getting enough documentation from Sistan and Baluchestan.” Historically, these areas are often at the forefront of protests, because the regime often has the bloodiest forms of repression in these provinces with marginalized ethnicities. Areas like Sistan and Baluchestan have a lot of economic poverty, so they’d have less access to something privileged like Starlink.

For all these years, myself, many people, have been working on this concept of internet censorship and internet shutdowns. And there really hasn’t been a way to reimagine this system. There’s this concept of digital sovereignty in place in terms of internet access and internet infrastructure that fits within national borders. In even the most democratic of countries, this is still national infrastructure that the government can have access or forms of control over.

This concept has to be broken. Satellite internet is really this way of reimagining connectivity, not just for Iran, but anywhere where lack of connectivity results in a crisis, whether humanitarian one, or a massacre of this proportion.

It’s really important to reconceive access to satellite internet in a way that could scale beyond those who are privileged and beyond those willing to take the risk. And one of the ideas that I’ve had and have been working on with other colleagues at Access Now has been to push for direct-to-cell access, which is a form of satellite internet connectivity that depends on technology that exists in phones created from 2020 onwards. We launched this campaign called Direct 2 Cell, hoping to push forward this concept.

On a personal note, how are you doing? Have you heard from your friends, family, other people you know in Iran recently?

I’ve been able to be in touch with some of my family and others here and there.

I also had that random FaceTime audio call from another person I know. I was very worried about them because they’ve been at the protests. I had heard through various others that they were okay, but I finally heard from them firsthand, and it was such a bizarre experience, speaking to them.

I had never heard them sound the way that they sounded: recounting their experience of leaving the protest before the military tanks came to open fire on the crowds, how they got tear gassed, and for the next few days, seeing water hoses washing blood off the streets. It sounded like they were making a lot of dark jokes — I had never heard them sound this way. I don’t know how you can walk the streets of your neighborhood, seeing people wash off blood, and just…. like, something not fundamentally change in your mind.

I just, I don’t, I can’t imagine how to process it if I was there. As someone in the diaspora, it’s hard to process being privileged and being away.