Iran’s internet shutdown is chillingly precise and may last some time | Iran
The 36-hour shutdown of Iran’s internet as authorities try to quell growing anti-government protests represents a “new peak” in its complexity and severity and could last a long time, experts say.
When the power outage started, 90% of internet traffic went to Iran evaporated. Iranian digital rights expert Amir Rashidi said that international calls to the country are blocked and domestic mobile phones are not in service.
This isn’t the first time a country has blocked the internet for political reasons. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak blocked the internet for six days during the 2011 Tahrir protests, and the Taliban shut down Afghanistan for 48 hours in September, ostensibly to curb “immorality.”
But the level of shutdown in Iran is unprecedented and in some ways much harsher than the digital blackout of 2019, which internet observers described as the biggest event at the time. “serious disconnect” They had seen it everywhere.
“There’s no signal on the phones. There’s no antenna. It’s like you’re living in the middle of nowhere, where there are no BTS towers,” Rashidi said.
Even Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system lifeline Rashidi said there was gridlock for Iranians in the protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022, although the scope varied from neighborhood to neighborhood.
While the internet connection of Iranians across the country was suddenly cut off, Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continued to connect to the internet. to post X did this at least 12 times on Friday, slamming Donald Trump and US action in Venezuela.
That’s what makes this outage different from previous internet blocks in Iran, said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert who studies such outages. It appears to be more comprehensive but also more fine-tuned, which potentially means Tehran could keep this going for longer.
“The government has important things to do. If they want to do propaganda, they need to access Telegram, they need to access Twitter, they need to access Instagram,” Rashidi said.
Referring to Mubarak’s closure in 2011, Madory said that “destroying everything would have huge costs.”
“If you look at what happened in Egypt… the government couldn’t function,” he said. “People really use the internet for a lot of things, and when they turn them all off, nothing works.”
Based on outside evidence, Madory and Rashidi believe that the Iranian government has whitelisted some sites, allowing some officials and institutions to continue accessing the internet.
Rashidi noted that some Telegram channels appear to be working and that their administrators must have internet service. Government appeared to be softening cut briefly On Friday, the service for university websites was shut down again.
All this shows that Iran is developing more sensitive tools to censor the internet. “If they implement a whitelist and it works as planned, that could allow them to operate in some kind of bad state for a long period of time,” Madory said.
“What they’re doing is they’re trying to set it up so that they don’t have to open everything back up. They just want the essentials to be able to communicate and then everything else is shut down.”
Rashidi and Madory said Iran has been working for several years to improve its ability to censor the internet, trying to create an internal service similar to China’s, connecting local users while separating them from the outside world.
He’s not the only one trying to improve government control of the internet. India building A government-run messaging app to rival WhatsApp and Russia pushing A state-backed “super app” similar to China’s WeChat.
Rashidi said Iran’s national model may not be working yet because linked sites are currently inaccessible.
With or without national internet, Madory suspects the power outage could linger for a while. “This could be long-term,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a while and I think it’s going to be something big.”
