Iran first imposed a near-total communications blackout on the third day of the protests that swept the country in January, and the restrictions were further tightened after the war with the United States and Israel began.

It is a familiar tool deployed by the clerical regime in Iran, which has a history of shutting down the internet to suppress protests and silence dissent: in 2019, during demonstrations against rising fuel prices; in 2022, during the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement after the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini; and again in January this year, as anti-government protests spread from Tehran to towns and cities across the country. 

Iran also shut down communications during the 12-day war with Israel in the summer of 2025, citing national security as a justification.

The regime resorted to the same tactic at the outbreak of the current war, which began on February 28. More than six weeks later, it remains in place and has become the longest internet blackout in Iran's history, leaving most Iranians with little more than access to state-controlled domestic networks and state media.

Cloudflare data showed internet traffic falling to almost zero during the January shutdown, while NetBlocks and other monitors say the blackout imposed since the US-Israeli attacks began has kept connectivity at only a tiny fraction of normal levels. 

The government's reasons are familiar: supporters of the regime say foreign agents, Israeli Mossad spies and government opponents are going online to send videos and images of sensitive military and state sites abroad.

But the restrictions have had far broader consequences than protecting national security or silencing dissent. They have left businesses unable to function, families cut off from one another and large parts of the country trapped inside a censored information system, which much of the Iranian public has little to no trust in. 

An era of 'digital apartheid'

Some have still managed to connect to the global web, but only through increasingly risky and expensive workarounds.

At the height of the protests in January, reports emerged that Elon Musk's Starlink had become an important lifeline for some users, even as Iranian authorities stepped up jamming and other efforts to disrupt the service.

As the crackdown has deepened, black-market access to Starlink equipment has reportedly become harder and costlier.

Residents inside Iran say the economics of access have become absurd. According to several people who spoke to DW, Starlink kits that once sold for around $1,000 (about €844) on the black market are now going for more than $5,000.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are still available, but often at prices most Iranians cannot afford. One source described paying as much as 1 million tomans ($12.60 or €10.68 to $16.00 or €13.57) per gigabyte for unstable filtered access.

In a country where the minimum monthly wage is around 16 million tomans, internet access has become a luxury that is unavailable to the vast majority of Iranians.

One resident inside Iran told DW that the country has entered "a digital apartheid era." They said the state had effectively turned connection to the outside world into a privilege distributed by class and loyalty.

"If you are university faculty, a pro-government journalist or part of an online propaganda project, you get internet access," they said. "If you are rich, you buy an expensive VPN. But if you are ordinary, your share is the national internet and high walls of censorship."

Online work has disappeared

One Tehran resident who used to run an online shop on Instagram told DW that the shutdown had effectively ended their business. "With the internet cut, I simply cannot work anymore," they said. "My savings are gone, and it has affected my life with my wife too, because she also used Instagram to advertise her work."

Buying a VPN no longer solves the problem, the source added, because customers themselves often cannot get online. "There is no point," they said. "Even if I manage to connect, my customers don't."

That encapsulates the deeper problem with long internet shutdowns: they don't just block one person from working, they break the network of relationships that enable online work in the first place.

Economist Hassan Mansur told DW that the scale of the economic damage is already enormous. He said official Iranian figures put the daily losses from the shutdown at around $37.7 million.

He added that lost income from Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp in January alone was estimated at $185 million, and that around 70% of all businesses in Iran are affected in some way by the internet disruption.

"The fall in revenue for online businesses is estimated at between 50 and 90%," he said, adding that some businesses have disappeared completely.

The Chinese model — without Chinese infrastructure

The Iranian state argues that the domestic intranet is sufficient and that people can still communicate on local platforms. But that argument has been met with deep public skepticism.

Many Iranians say they do not trust government-backed messaging apps, fearing they are monitored or directly accessible by the security services. That distrust is reinforced by repeated accounts of arrests linked to digital surveillance.

Saeed Sozangar, a digital rights activist and network security instructor, wrote on X that intelligence agents had access to his WhatsApp chats while they were arresting him. "While they were beating me, they said: 'What did you want to say that you said? Let's go from here to Telegram? You thought it was safe there?" he alleged.

Mansur argues that Iran is trying to imitate China's closed internet model while lacking the technological ecosystem to replace the open web.

"Unlike China, Iran does not have robust domestic search engines, cloud systems or national social platforms," he told DW. That leaves the state trying to force people onto an internal network that is weaker, less trusted and far less functional than the global internet it is meant to replace.

The result is not digital autonomy in the Chinese sense — it is digital deprivation.

Isolation, anger and a shrinking public sphere

The shutdown has also reshaped how information reaches people inside Iran.

As access to the global internet has vanished, satellite television has become one of the few remaining ways many households can still get outside news. At the same time, interference with satellite signals has also made that route less reliable.

Some Persian-language media outlets abroad have responded by reviving shortwave broadcasts, a reminder that in moments of deep censorship, technology can move backward as well as forward.

That narrowing of access has political consequences. It makes it harder for Iranians to verify claims, harder for outside media to hear directly from people on the ground, and easier for the state to impose its own narrative.

The government insists the blackout is necessary for national security. But for many Iranians, the shutdown has become yet another sign that the regime is prepared to do anything to protect itself, even at the expense of the Iranian people.

Edited by: Karl Sexton