The internet blackout in Iran is now one of the longest on record, as protests continue

As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians have been completely blocked from accessing the internet for more than a week, in what is now one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns ever, according to experts.

Last Thursday, Iran’s leadership blocked internet and phone access across the country in response to massive anti-government protests, which began at the end of last year and sparked a brutal and deadly crackdown by authorities.

As of this writing, Iranians have been unable to access the Internet for more than 170 hours. The country’s longest internet outages lasted about 163 hours in 2019, and 160 hours in 2025, according to Esik Mater, research director at NetBlocks, a web monitoring firm that tracks internet outages.

Mater said that the current internet outage in Iran is the third longest outage ever, after the internet outage in Sudan in mid-2021, which lasted about 35 days, followed by the internet outage in Mauritania in July 2024, which lasted 22 days.

“Iran’s internet blackouts remain among the most extensive and tightly enforced nationwide power outages that we have observed, especially with regard to affected populations,” Matter told TechCrunch.

The exact ranking depends on how each organization measures the closing process.

Zach Rawson, a researcher who studies internet disruptions at the digital rights nonprofit AccessNow, told TechCrunch that according to his data, Iran’s ongoing lockdown is on track to break the ten longest lockdowns in history.

The Iranian government has a long record of shutting down internet access during times of protests and civil unrest, often making it more difficult to monitor protests from outside the country.

A US-based rights group estimates that there have been more than 600 protests in cities across Iran, and by one estimate, the Iranian government’s violent crackdown has left at least 2,000 people dead.

The lockdown in Iran on January 8 was sudden, cutting off internet service to government institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since then, access to some government departments, and some parts of the economy, such as bank transfers and payment processors at gas stations, has been restored, as the Financial Times reported this week.

According to The Guardian, a relatively small but unknown number of Iranians are using Starlink terminals smuggled into the country to connect to the Internet. In 2022, the Biden administration granted a waiver to US government sanctions against Iran to “increase support for internet freedom,” allowing US technology companies to provide connectivity to Iranians for free, paving the way for Starlink to operate in Iran.

Authorities have since cracked down on Starlink users by making it illegal to own a Starlink station, jamming entire neighborhoods, and confiscating devices.

This week, President Donald Trump threatened military intervention if Iranian forces continued to use violence, while reducing the number of personnel at a military base in neighboring Qatar, amid fears of a possible retaliatory strike. The US military has reportedly redirected a naval strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East.

But Trump said on Wednesday that he had information that “the killing has stopped and that executions will not be carried out,” but he acknowledged that “who knows?”

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom closed its embassy in the Iranian capital, Tehran, and evacuated its staff. Iran temporarily closed its airspace on Wednesday.