The Brief

Iran’s nationwide internet blackout has reached 240 continuous hours — ten full days — with connectivity holding at 1% of ordinary levels since US-Israeli strikes began on February 28, according to monitoring group NetBlocks. The shutdown, which has left approximately 90 million Iranians cut off from the global internet, is now among the most severe government-imposed blackouts ever recorded, with the country having spent roughly one-third of 2026 offline. Only senior officials and state-aligned media retain access through whitelisted networks.

The Report

Iran’s government-imposed internet shutdown entered its eleventh day on March 11 with no indication of restoration, as the war triggered by US-Israeli strikes on February 28 continues across the region. NetBlocks confirmed on March 10 that the blackout had reached 240 hours, making it the second-longest registered in Iran after the 21-day shutdown imposed during January’s nationwide protests.

Connectivity dropped to approximately 1% of ordinary levels within minutes of the first strikes — the same strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and has remained there since. Cloudflare Radar reported traffic “close to zero across all major regions,” with Tehran, Fars, Isfahan, Alborz, and Razavi Khorasan identified as experiencing near-complete shutdowns. Georgia Tech’s Internet Intelligence Lab measured roughly 3% residual connectivity, attributed to government and state services operating through Iran’s National Information Network.

The blackout operates through a system of selective access. Government websites, local banking platforms, and state media remain functional through centrally managed gateways using deep packet inspection. Meanwhile, an estimated 16,000 holders of so-called “white SIM cards” — mobile lines exempt from filtering — retain access to blocked platforms including X, Telegram, and Instagram. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani confirmed authorities are providing connectivity to “those who can better deliver the message,” without directly acknowledging the white SIM card system.

The economic cost is substantial, though disputed. NetBlocks estimates losses at $37.4 million per day — $1.56 million per hour — while Iran’s own communications minister has cited $35.7 million daily. Online sales have fallen 80%. Tipax, a major delivery company that handled 320,000 daily shipments before the January protests, now processes fewer than a few hundred. Approximately 10 million Iranians depend directly on digital platforms for their livelihoods.

The humanitarian dimension has drawn sharp criticism. Iran lacks a functioning air-raid warning system and has no public shelters. Israeli military evacuation warnings, issued through social media, are inaccessible to the population they are meant to reach. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that the restrictions have left “millions unable to access basic safety information during active hostilities.” Human Rights Watch noted that doctors attempting to document casualties, families searching for missing relatives, and journalists trying to upload photographs largely cannot connect.

Iranian telecoms companies have warned users against attempting to circumvent the blackout. Police text messages have threatened that repeated connection attempts will result in blocked phone lines and judicial referral. NetBlocks characterised the environment as “increasingly Orwellian.” The regime has also deployed jammers against an estimated 50,000 smuggled Starlink terminals, claiming to have disabled 40,000 connections. Possession of satellite equipment carries up to ten years’ imprisonment.

Mohajerani indicated that access would not be restored “until at least late March” and signalled it would “never return to its previous form.”

The Angle

The asymmetry is worth stating plainly. Iranian officials post on X, directing English-language messaging at American domestic audiences — Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accusing Trump of turning “America First” into “Israel First” — while 90 million of their own citizens cannot load a weather forecast or check whether a family member is alive. The government calls this information management. What it is, functionally, is a country’s leadership operating on the global internet and locking the population inside an intranet, then using the access gap to narrate a war that the people living through it cannot describe for themselves.

This is not a wartime communications restriction in any historically recognisable sense. Wartime censorship has always been selective — you redact troop positions, you delay operational details. What Iran has built is something structurally different: a two-tier information architecture where the state broadcasts and the population receives, with the connection between them entirely one-directional. The comparison that keeps surfacing is North Korea’s Kwangmyong intranet, but the distinction matters. North Korea built its wall before its citizens went online. Iran is attempting to seal off 90 million people who already know what the open internet looks like, in the middle of an economic collapse and an active bombardment, while its own officials continue to use the platforms they have made illegal for everyone else.

The economic numbers — $37 million a day, 80% drop in online sales, a major logistics company reduced from 320,000 shipments to a few hundred — quantify the self-inflicted damage. But the number that carries more weight is the one that doesn’t appear in any ledger: the count of evacuation warnings issued by the IDF through social media platforms that the intended recipients cannot access, in a country with no air-raid sirens and no public shelters. That is not a communications policy. It is the conversion of an information monopoly into a physical safety gap, applied to the entire civilian population of a country under bombardment.

The government spokesperson’s statement that access will “never return to its previous form” deserves to be taken at face value. A regime that has shut down the internet three times in ten weeks — during protests, during the post-protest crackdown, and now during a war — is not experiencing a series of emergencies. It is building a permanent operating model. The pattern is the policy.

The first country to build a wartime information architecture that silences its own civilians while amplifying its own voice abroad has established a template. The question is how many governments were watching closely enough to take notes.