As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians have been blocked from accessing the internet for more than a week, in what is now one of the longest internet shutdowns in the world, according to experts.
last thursday, Iran’s leadership blocks internet and phone access across the country in response massive anti-government protestswhich started at the end of last year and has been requested brutal and deadly crackdown from the authorities.
As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for over 170 hours. The country’s previous longest blackout was 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.
Mater said the current shutdown in Iran is the third-longest on record, after an internet blackout in Sudan in mid-2021 that lasted about 35 days, followed by a blackout in Mauritania in July 2024, which lasted 22 days.
“Iran shutdowns remain among the most complete and tightly enforced nationwide blackouts we have observed, especially in terms of the population affected,” Mater told TechCrunch.
The exact ranking depends on how each organization measures the shutdown.
Zach Rosson, a researcher who studies internet disruptions at digital rights nonprofit AccessNow, told TechCrunch that according to data, the ongoing shutdown in Iran is on track to crack. top ten longest shutdowns in history.
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The Iranian government has a long record of shutting down access to the internet during protests and civil unrest, often making it more difficult to monitor protests from outside the country.
US-based human rights group forecast that there have been more than 600 protests in cities in Iran, and accordingly one assessmentIran’s government act violently has resulted in the deaths of at least 2,000 people.
At shutdown in Iran on January 8 suddenly, cutting off government institutions like 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 gas stations, have access restored, as The Financial Times reported this week.
According to The Guardiana 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 carve out an exception against the US government’s sanctions on Iran to “increase support for internet freedom,” and allow US technology companies to provide connectivity to Iranians for free, paving the way for Starlink to operate in Iran.
Authorities have since cracked down on Starlink registered by make it is illegal to have a Starlink terminal, jammed the whole neighborhood, and confiscation of tools.
This week, President Donald Trump threatened by the military intervene if Iranian forces continue to use violence, all the while reduce personnel at a military base in neighboring Qatar, amid fears of a possible retaliatory attack. So does the US military the news directing a naval strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East.
But on Wednesday, Trump said He has information that “the killings have stopped and the executions will not take place,” but admits, “who knows?”
Meanwhile, England close the embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran and evacuated its staff. Iran temporarily closed airspace on Wednesday.