The Future of Iran’s Internet Is More Uncertain Than Ever

For more than six days, almost 90 million Iranians have been living under a total internet blackout. The shutdown comes after Iranians endured a similar total internet blackout at the beginning of January, followed by weeks of limited connectivity while the regime brutally attacked and killed thousands of anti-government protesters. But as the US and Israel’s war on Iran intensifies, the conflict is adding a new dimension to what would otherwise be a damaging but not unprecedented internet blackout.

In these situations, and by the regime’s design, the populace still has access to the country’s homegrown intranet and suite of applications, known as the National Information Network or NIN, so daily life can continue. Iranians have by now also built and refined a playbook for staying online as much as possible when the Iranian regime restricts connectivity, using VPNs and other proxy networks to access the global internet. While many of those circumvention tools still work, at least to a degree, during partial blackouts, they aren’t accessible during total shutdowns. As is often the case, only the Iranian government, military, and wealthy elites currently have access to the outside internet, along with a small group of additional gateways that get internet access from Starlink terminals.

Iranians were plunged into internet darkness almost immediately after US and Israeli missiles hit the country on February 28, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Since then, says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik, there has been “minimal traffic” leaving the country, with all networks seeing around 99 percent drops in traffic. “The understanding is that there is some whitelisting allowing that [remaining] traffic to pass, either for an individual with favored status or for some technical rationale like updating encryption certificates,” he says.

But even this sliver of connectivity is not immune from wartime disruption. “Within the limited connectivity that remains, multiple networks have experienced additional outages,” Madory says, adding that technical failures caused by air strikes on Iran are likely responsible. Georgia Tech’s internet monitoring project, IODA, has also reported “damage to critical internet or power infrastructure” knocking Iranian networks offline. “Even if the government shutdown were lifted, connectivity problems could persist due to infrastructure damage. The shutdown masks our ability to understand the true state of connectivity in Iran,” Madory says.

Over the past decade, the Iranian regime has built out the technical infrastructure, laws, and surveillance apparatus to digitally suppress its citizens. Multiple internet shutdowns in 2019, 2022, 2025, and now twice this year have demonstrated more sophisticated blocking techniques. With each internet blackout, Iranians have been cut off from loved ones, unable to access accurate news, and silenced when trying to get evidence of regime abuses or potential war crimes out of the country.

As Iran’s control and censorship has intensified over the years, it has developed the NIN and its internal suite of apps as a solution for allowing daily life in Iran to continue and keeping the economy running when global connectivity is turned off. Iranian digital rights group Filterwatch says that during the current shutdown it has seen the government promoting a domestic search engine as part of the country’s intranet. The group also says it has observed the government sending some text messages warning that people connecting to the global internet could face legal action.

NIN platforms are hotbeds of surveillance and information control in general. Experts say that the intranet’s “authoritarian network design” is creating tiered access in Iran, where global connectivity can be provided selectively to elites, tech companies, universities, or other institutions and not the general population.

This access seemingly includes potential state-backed news and propaganda. An analysis published on Thursday by the Iranian fact-checking organization Factnameh looked at 50,000 Telegram posts during the first 72 hours of the war from 50 prominent Telegram channels that stayed active despite the shutdown—including some directly linked to the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Even after internet restrictions were imposed, no interruption in activity was observed,” the report says. “In fact, the channels became more active than before.” The analysis found that some channels appeared to “exaggerate reports” of Iranian retaliatory missile strikes. Meanwhile, posts in the channels noticeably did not mention rumors about the death of Khamenei before it was confirmed.

The Telegram activity is potentially revealing, says Fereidoon Bashar, executive director of the Toronto-based company ASL19, which is behind Factnameh. The group argues that the 50 channels shed light on what the regime’s priorities were as the war first unfolded. “They have pivoted from trying to control information flows and decided that they need to participate in online spaces and actively shape narratives, including in English,” Bashar says.

For most ordinary Iranians, though, connections to the global internet are nonexistent. Having faced years of repressive internet shutdowns, Iranian civil society groups, members of the public, and activists have developed processes and networks to get people online and get information out of the country, from smuggling Starlink satellite systems into the country to smuggling videos of violence out of the country during the January shutdown.

One circumvention app for desktop and mobile that people use to access the internet—and that was particularly widely used in Iran in January and February—is the peer-to-peer platform Conduit. The protocol, created by software company Psiphon, helps people get online by routing their encrypted traffic through a network of volunteer devices around the world. In the wake of Iran’s 2019 internet shutdown, Psiphon began developing Conduit with funding from the United States State Department and Open Tech Fund (OTF). Conduit grew and matured, but in May 2025 it was impacted by funding cuts the Trump administration made to a number of open internet initiatives, part of the massive dismantling of US international aid efforts.

For months, Psiphon worked to bridge the gap and keep Conduit available. Finally, in February, the State Department released some funds for Psiphon’s research and development work on Conduit and OTF offered a new contract to help pay for data usage. Psiphon says that Republican senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma were key supporters.

The lack of connectivity in Iran over the past two months, though, has illustrated the need for tools like Conduit that are flexible and adaptable as a government attempts to stymie circumvention efforts. Psiphon says that at the beginning of February there were about 375,000 “Conduit Stations” running outside of Iran. On a peak day at the end of January, there were more than 9 million Iranians using the Psiphon network to access the open internet. Psiphon had nearly 19 million unique users inside Iran in January and more than 21 million unique users in February.

“That was kind of mind-boggling, the scale was just super amazing,” says Ali Tehrani, Psiphon’s director of DC operations. “People outside the country could let their phone be the bouncing board for Iranians inside.”

With the full shutdown in recent days, access to even the most shrewd circumvention tools has been drastically limited, but Tehrani says Conduit has still had 60,000 to 100,000 Iranian users per day this week. “It is at 1 percent connectivity, but it is never zero,” he says.

After spending most of 2026 mostly offline already, Iranians are now living under full-scale kinetic attack. It is currently unclear how Iranian leadership and governance will evolve as a result of the conflict—leaving the future of the NIN and the country’s access to the external internet in an even more uncertain state than ever.