By Kayhan Life and Kayhan London Staff
The Iranian authorities have sharply escalated restrictions on Internet access as the nationwide protests enter their second week. They have gone from intermittent disruptions to what appears to be a widespread shutdown of global connectivity across parts of the country.
Reports from multiple provinces indicate that beginning on the evening of Jan. 7—the 11th day of anti-government demonstrations—access to the global internet was severed or severely curtailed in a growing number of cities. The move followed a marked expansion of protests earlier in the week, and with public calls by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince, for renewed street demonstrations and nightly chants at 8 p.m. on Dec. 8 and Dec. 9.
According to local accounts, internet disruptions intensified from the evening of Dec. 7 in cities including Shiraz and Isfahan, and in parts of Iran’s western Kurdish regions, where many users reported being unable to connect to the global internet.
In Tehran, residents across several districts described extreme slowdowns affecting both mobile and fixed-line connections, at times rendering messaging apps, internet-based calls, and even basic web browsing unusable. Similar conditions were reported in nearby Karaj, where some neighborhoods experienced brief but repeated outages.
Users in other major urban centers—including Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Tabriz—also reported a noticeable degradation in service quality. In some areas, access to international internet services was unstable, with connections to foreign platforms and to virtual private networks frequently disrupted.
Iranian state-affiliated media acknowledged that the outages were neither uniform nor nationwide, and noted that their severity varied by city, neighborhood, and telecommunications provider. Since the start of the protests on Dec. 28, authorities had already imposed localized shutdowns and bandwidth reductions in protest hotspots, particularly during peak demonstration hours. The disruptions that began late on Jan. 7, however, appeared broader and more systematic.
Iran has repeatedly used Internet shutdowns as a tool of repression over the past decade, a practice that began under President Hassan Rouhani and intensified during major unrest. Nationwide Internet blackouts were imposed during the protests of 2019 and 2022, as well as during the 12-day military confrontation with Israel. Each shutdown has inflicted heavy losses on Iran’s digital economy, a young but dynamic sector that has struggled under persistent connectivity restrictions and has seen a wave of startup relocations abroad.
Technology experts warn that prolonged or expanded shutdowns could deal a devastating blow to the sector, erasing Persian-language content from the web and sharply weakening Iran’s links to the global technology ecosystem. Much of Iran’s digital economy—directly and indirectly—depends on access to the worldwide internet. The immediate effect of a cutoff is the loss of inbound international traffic: Iranian websites disappear from global search engines such as Google, search rankings collapse, international advertising platforms shut down, and social media—now central to marketing and sales for many businesses—go dark.
As of midmorning on Jan. 8 in Tehran, government officials had offered no public explanation. Unofficial reports suggested that authorities were preparing for a more comprehensive cutoff of global internet access while shifting users to Iran’s tightly controlled domestic network, commonly referred to as the “national Internet.”
Shortly after midnight, Hamed Beidi, the director of the civic platform Karzar, wrote on X that a complete shutdown could occur within hours. His warning aligned with data published by Cloudflare, whose network monitoring tools showed significant anomalies in Iran’s connectivity.
The tightening of internet controls coincided with a surge in street protests. From early on Jan. 7 all the way through midnight, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in cities across Iran, chanting slogans against the Islamic Republic and expressing support for Reza Pahlavi and the restoration of a constitutional monarchy. The same day, a widening strike by bazaar merchants disrupted commerce in Tehran, Tabriz, Ahvaz, and Qazvin, underscoring the protests’ growing economic dimension.
The timing of the internet shutdown—just ahead of Reza Pahlavi’s call for further demonstrations and nightly chants on Thursday and Friday—suggested deep concern within the government over the possibility of renewed mass mobilization, particularly in large metropolitan areas.
In a video message released hours after the disruptions began, Reza Pahlavi said he had received reports indicating that “the regime is terrified and is once again trying to cut off the internet.” He added that communication with supporters would continue “whether through hundreds of thousands of Starlink terminals inside Iran or through broadcasters such as Iran International and Manoto,” referring to satellite internet provided by Starlink and to Persian-language television networks operating from abroad.
“If the regime makes this mistake and shuts down the Internet,” he said, “that itself becomes another call to remain present and to take over the streets—another nail in the coffin of this regime.”
