As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians have been completely blocked from accessing the internet for more than a week. Experts now consider this one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns ever recorded.
The shutdown began last Thursday when Iran’s leadership blocked internet and phone access across the entire country. This action was a response to massive anti-government protests, which began at the end of last year and have prompted a brutal and deadly crackdown from authorities. As of this writing, Iranians have been unable to access the internet for more than 170 hours.
The previous longest shutdowns in Iran lasted around 163 hours in 2019 and 160 hours in 2025, according to Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a web monitoring company. Mater stated that the current shutdown in Iran is the third longest on record globally. It follows the internet shutdown in Sudan in mid-2021 that lasted around 35 days and the outage in Mauritania in July 2024, which lasted 22 days.
Mater told TechCrunch that Iran’s shutdowns remain among the most comprehensive and tightly enforced nationwide blackouts observed, particularly in terms of the population affected. The exact ranking can depend on how each organization measures a shutdown. Zach Rosson, a researcher at the digital rights nonprofit AccessNow, said that according to its data, the ongoing shutdown in Iran is on a path to crack the top ten longest shutdowns in history.
Iran’s government has a long track record of shutting down internet access during times of protest and civil unrest, often making it more difficult to monitor events from outside the country. A U.S.-based human rights group estimates there have been more than 600 protests in cities across Iran. According to one estimate, the government’s violent crackdown has led to the deaths of at least 2,000 people.
The shutdown on January 8 was sudden, cutting off government institutions like the foreign ministry. Since then, some government departments and parts of the economy, such as bank transfers and payment processors at gas stations, have had their access restored, as reported by The Financial Times this week.
According to The Guardian, a relatively small but unknown number of Iranians have been using Starlink terminals smuggled into the country to connect to the internet. In 2022, the Biden administration created an exemption to U.S. sanctions against Iran to increase support for internet freedom, allowing U.S. tech companies to provide connectivity to Iranians for free and paving the way for Starlink to operate. Authorities have since cracked down by making it illegal to own a Starlink terminal, jamming entire neighborhoods, and confiscating the devices.
This week, President Donald Trump threatened military intervention if Iranian forces continue to use violence, while reducing personnel at a military base in neighboring Qatar amid concerns of a possible retaliatory strike. The U.S. military also reportedly redirected a naval strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East. On Wednesday, however, Trump said he had information that the killing had stopped and executions would not take place, but conceded that who could know for sure.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom shuttered its embassy in Iran’s capital Tehran and evacuated its staff. Iran temporarily closed off its airspace on Wednesday.