Iran’s Internet Blackout Hits Phones, Starlink
The Iranian regime’s internet shutdown , initiated on Jan. 8, 2026, has severely diminished the flow of information out of the country. Without internet access, little news about the national protests that flared between Dec. 30, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026 , and the regime’s violent crackdown has reached the world. Many digital rights and internet monitoring groups have assessed the current shutdown to be the most sophisticated and most severe in Iran’s history .
We are a social scientist and two computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Intelligence Lab who study internet connectivity .
Through the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, we have been measuring internet connectivity globally since 2011. The project was motivated by the internet shutdowns during the Arab Spring mass protests that began in December 2010 against Middle Eastern and North African regimes.
The project provides a public dashboard of internet connectivity measurements. Its long view of global internet connectivity offers insight into the Iranian regime’s developing sophistication in controlling information and shutting down the internet in the country.
Our measurements show that Iran has been in a complete internet shutdown since Jan. 8. This is longer than the 48½-hour shutdown in June 2025 during the Israel-Iran war and surpasses the duration of the November 2019 shutdown that lasted almost seven days. Compared to the two weeks of nightly mobile phone network shutdowns in September to October of 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests , this shutdown is more complete by also closing down fixed-line connectivity.
The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project measures global internet connectivity through three signals related to internet infrastructure: routing announcements, active probing and internet background noise.
Core routers, unlike the router in your home, are responsible for directing traffic to and from networks. Routing announcements are how they communicate with each other. If a nation’s network of routers stop making these announcements, the network will disappear from the global internet.
We also measure the responsiveness of networks through probing. To create the probing signal, we continuously ping devices in millions of networks around the globe. Most devices are designed to automatically respond to these pings by echoing them back to the sender. We collect these responses and label networks as “connected/active.”
A tool we use dubbed “network telescope” captures internet background noise – traffic generated by hundreds of thousands of internet hosts worldwide. A drop in this signal can indicate an outage.
The first nationwide shutdown that the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project observed in Iran was during the ” Bloody November ” uprising that happened in 2019. During that shutdown, the primary method the regime used was turning off routing announcements, which stopped all traffic between routers. This is a blunt force tool that makes the internet essentially go dark; no connectivity is possible for affected networks.
However, our measurement reporting showed differences in signal-drop patterns among the three data sources we track. These patterns demonstrate the regime’s adoption of diverse disconnection mechanisms and large differences in the timing of disconnection by various Iranian internet service providers (ISPs).
This reporting also showed evidence that the 2019 blackout was not complete and some people were able to circumvent it. Nevertheless, as documented by Amnesty International, the internet darkness created a ” web of impunity ” that allowed the regime to violate international human rights law without any accountability.
In September 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom protests erupted after the killing of Mahsa Amini in state custody. To suppress the nationwide mobilization without exacting a high cost, the Iranian regime implemented nightly shutdowns affecting only mobile networks . Keeping fixed-line internet connections online limited the impact of these shutdowns to mitigate the economic, political and social costs.
These nightly internet curfews lasted about two weeks. During this time the regime implemented other forms of censorship, specifically blocking applications to further control the information environment and to prevent access to technologies for circumventing censorship.
In June 2025, the Israel-Iran war began and we observed initial degradation in internet connectivity, which often occurs during times of conflict, when internet and power infrastructure are affected by missile attacks. The Iranian regime shut down the internet over four days, citing national security as its rationale.
That time, the regime did not use routing announcements to implement the shutdown. Our measurement data shows that routing announcements were largely unaffected. Instead, the Iranian regime implemented the shutdown by interfering with key protocols that allow the internet to function, including transport layer security and the domain name system .
The regime used these techniques to shut off Iran’s connectivity with the global internet while allowing specific, sanctioned access in a policy called whitelisting. This strategy shows an increased sophistication in how the Iranian regime implements shutdowns and controls the flow of information.
Organizations that support digital human rights in Iran report that some Iranians were able to circumvent the shutdown using virtual private networks and various censorship-resilient technologies such as peer-to-peer networks .
On Dec. 30, 2025, the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project team received reports of internet disruptions amid the start of nationwide protests. At 8 p.m. Iran Standard Time on Jan. 8, 2026, the Iranian regime shut down the internet. Our measurements show a nominal amount of responsiveness to our active probing, about 3%. This small amount could be an artifact of our measurements or lingering connectivity for whitelisted access, for example for Iranian government officials and services.
Outside of very limited whitelisted connectivity, digital human rights groups reported severely limited access to the internet both internationally and domestically. According to digital rights group Project Ainita , the Iranian regime implemented the shutdown by interfering with transport layer security and the domain name system. In addition, landline phone calls have been only intermittently available.
Aside from these more sophisticated techniques, this shutdown evokes the Bloody November shutdown of 2019 in that it has been ordered during a time of protest with mass civilian casualties .
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, low Earth orbit satellite services, such as Starlink, can help people maintain internet connectivity during outages and government-ordered shutdowns. These satellite services can allow users to bypass damaged or state-censored terrestrial internet infrastructure.
However, accessing the internet via satellite services during a shutdown is not without risk. User terminals communicate with satellites via radio frequency links that can be detected through surveillance, for example from planes or drones, potentially exposing users’ locations and putting them at risk of being identified. Currently, the Iranian regime is using jammers to degrade the Starlink connection .
One of the most significant barriers to connecting users in Iran to satellite services is a logistical one. Providing connectivity via Starlink’s service would require distributing a large number of user terminals within the country, a feat that would be difficult because the devices are likely to be considered illegal contraband by the government. This severely limits the scale at which such services can be adopted.
Recent technological developments, however, may partially mitigate this challenge. Starlink’s direct-to-cell capability, which aims to provide LTE cellular connectivity directly to ordinary cellphones, could reduce dependence on specialized hardware. If they become widely available, such systems would allow users to connect using common devices already in circulation, sidestepping one of the most difficult barriers to providing connectivity.
Like other radio-based communications, however, direct-to-cell connectivity would remain vulnerable to signal jamming and other forms of electronic interference by the government.
For the time being, the Iranian regime controls the country’s internet infrastructure, which means it still has a virtual off switch.
Amanda Meng receives funding from the State Department.
Alberto Dainotti receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. IODA was initially built with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate. A large body of IODA work was also funded by the U.S. State Department and by the Open Technology Fund.
Zachary Bischof receives funding from the State Department.