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 largest nationwide Internet shutdowns ever, according to experts.
Last Thursday, Iran’s leadership cut off internet and phone access across the country in response mass anti-government protestswhich started late last year and caused a brutal and deadly repression from the authorities.
As of this writing, Iranians have been without internet access for over 170 hours. The country’s previous longest outages lasted about 163 hours in 2019 and 160 hours in 2025, according to Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, a web monitoring company that tracks internet outages.
Matter said the current outage in Iran is the third-longest on record, following an internet outage in Sudan in mid-2021 that lasted about 35 days, followed by an outage in Mauritania in July 2024 that lasted 22 days.
“The blackouts in Iran remain among the most comprehensive and tightly enforced nationwide blackouts we’ve seen, particularly in terms of the population affected,” Mather told TechCrunch.
The exact ranking depends on how each organization measures a closure.
Zach Rosson, a researcher who studies internet outages at the nonprofit digital rights company Access Now, told TechCrunch that according to its data, the ongoing blackout in Iran is on track to break. the 10 biggest outages in history.
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Iran’s government has a long history of shutting down Internet access during times of protests and civil unrest, often making it more difficult to follow the protests outside the country.
A US-based human rights group estimates that there have been more than 600 demonstrations in cities across Iran and according to an estimateof the Iranian government violent repression it has led to the death of at least 2,000 people.
The shutdown in Iran on January 8 was sudden, cutting off government institutions such as the foreign ministry from the Internet. Since then, some government departments and some parts of the economy, such as bank transfers and payment processors at petrol stations, have had their access restored, according to the Financial Times reported this week.
According to The Guardiana relatively small but unknown number of Iranians use Starlink terminals smuggled into the country to connect to the internet. In 2022, the Biden administration draw an exception to the US government’s sanctions against Iran to “increase support for internet freedom” and allow US tech companies to provide free connectivity to Iranians, paving the way for Starlink to operate in Iran.
Since then, the authorities have cracked down on Starlink users construction it is illegal to have a Starlink terminal, jamming entire neighborhoods, and confiscation of devices.
This week, President Donald Trump threatened military intervention if Iranian forces continue to use force during this time staff reduction at a military base in neighboring Qatar, amid concerns of possible retaliation. The US military too according to information redirected a naval strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East.
But on Wednesday, Trump said had information that “the killing has stopped and the executions will not take place,” but admitted that “who knows?”
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom closed his embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, and evacuated its staff. Iran temporarily closed in its airspace on Wednesday.
