The pattern of Iranian shutdowns
Iran has become one of the most-watched cases of state-ordered internet control. Shutdowns follow a pattern. In quiet times, many foreign services are blocked but the domestic internet works. During protests, elections, or the anniversaries of past protests, the government throttles international bandwidth. In sharper moments — the November 2019 fuel protests, the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022 — the international connection is cut almost entirely for days.
Network measurement projects at OONI, IODA, and Cloudflare Radar log these events in near real time. Their public dashboards let anyone outside the country see when a shutdown starts and when it lifts.
What a "shutdown" actually looks like
From inside the country a shutdown does not always look like a full outage. It is often selective. Domestic sites work. Iranian banking and government portals work. Foreign social media does not. Messaging apps whose servers sit outside Iran fail intermittently. Video calls to family abroad drop.
- Throttling. International speeds crawl. Web pages load, badly. Video does not.
- Selective blocks. Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram (all popular in Iran) go dark on specific days.
- Full international outage. Only domestic traffic works. This is the most severe case.
- Regional shutdowns. A single province loses connectivity to send a targeted message.
These are not permanent policy changes. They are tools deployed at will. That is what makes them unpredictable and hard to plan around.
The tools that keep working
People inside Iran have relied on a handful of tools that have proven relatively robust. Psiphon has famously kept working through several shutdowns because it rotates entry points aggressively. Tor with Snowflake has helped people reach news outlets when other options failed. Signal has been the messenger of choice for people who need to talk without the domestic apps' servers reading along.
None of these tools is fully immune. Every big shutdown has been paired with efforts to block the specific IP ranges the tools use. What has helped is the range of tools funded and audited through programs like the Open Technology Fund: when one tool breaks, another still works, and users learn to keep two or three installed at once.
Data preservation during blackouts
During a shutdown, the most fragile evidence is video and photos of what is happening on the ground. If a phone is lost, seized, or wiped, those files are gone. People who anticipate a shutdown do a few practical things.
| Habit | What it protects against |
|---|---|
| Encrypted device backup to a personal cloud abroad | Phone loss or seizure |
| Full-disk encryption plus a strong PIN | Forensic tools at checkpoints |
| Signal disappearing messages | Chat history reaching a raid |
| Off-device copies for sensitive footage | Total device failure |
Journalists and human-rights groups often coordinate a small "buddy" abroad to receive files as fast as they can be sent through whatever circumvention tool is working that day. That buddy becomes the archive if the phone goes.
What happens when the lights come back on
Every Iranian shutdown ends. What people do in the first hours after the connection returns matters. Rights groups upload evidence in bulk before the next outage begins. Independent media outlets publish stories that had been held back for safety. Ordinary families upload the videos they took, quietly, from a coffee shop or a friend's connection. And researchers race to log the technical footprint of the shutdown itself — which networks went dark first, which came back last — because that footprint is how the next shutdown gets predicted.
The other quiet work is around the returning users themselves. People who lived through a shutdown pass the tools to friends and family who did not know how to prepare last time. A single week of blackout usually leaves a country with a lot more people who know what Psiphon or Snowflake is than knew before. Iran's internet shutdowns are one of the clearest reminders in the world today that the open internet is not automatic; it is built and defended by real people every time it goes dark.