ការដាច់ចរន្តអគ្គិសនីនៅអ៊ីរ៉ង់តាមតួលេខ
How the Islamic Republic’s repressive tactics stack up against regimes around the world.
Last Thursday, Iran initiated a near-total internet blackout in response to anti-government protests that first began in December and have since rapidly grown nationwide, becoming the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic in years. Within a half-hour of the digital shutdown, internet traffic plummeted by 90 percent. In the following days, internet connectivity has since been close to zero percent, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis database.
Compared with previous internet shutdowns in Iran, the present one is considerably more extreme. For the first time ever, the government has blocked access to Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider that helped keep civilians online during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022.
The implications of such a blanket shutdown are serious. While government officials remain online (including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose X feed is active), protesters and civilians are prevented from sharing information with one another and documenting human rights abuses for the outside world. So far, according to multiple reports, the death toll has risen to hundreds or even thousands since the demonstrations began on Dec. 28, 2025.
As the shutdown endures, Foreign Policy has taken a look at how Iran’s latest bout of internet repression stacks up against other bans domestically and globally.
Including the current internet blackout, Iran has experienced four government-imposed national internet shutdowns since 2019, when an eight-day blackout marked new levels of technological oppression following anti-government protests over increased oil prices.
Iranians then experienced a near-total internet blackout for more than 12 days in November 2022—its longest as of now—during the nationwide protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. The government’s ban of platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, X, YouTube, and Facebook remain in place to this day.
Most recently, the Islamic Republic shut down internet services in June 2025 during its 12-day war with Israel. All told, Iran has experienced 892 hours (and counting) of national internet shutdowns since 2019.
The total hours of national internet shutdowns in Iran, combined with regional blackouts and more than three years of communications platform bans, puts the country seventh on a list of nations with the highest total length of internet bans since 2018, according to data from the Internet Society, a nonprofit that advocates for open internet access.
With 17 discrete national and regional shutdowns since 2018, Iran is tied with Algeria for sixth place among all nations.
Sometimes, those blackouts are localized and time-limited. When former President Ebrahim Raisi visited Iran’s Kurdistan province in November 2023, for instance, the region was cut off from the internet for two hours in order to disrupt potential protests.
India’s first-place rankings for both metrics since 2018 are likewise the result of regional blackouts, which it has frequently imposed during times of unrest. Often, these bans last just a few days. But between 2019 and 2021, Jammu and Kashmir endured 552 days of little to no internet connection, the longest shutdown on record.
Myanmar and China rank second and third, respectively, for the total number of hours without internet access but do not feature on the list of the top 10 for number of shutdowns. That discrepancy partially reflects the ongoing, multiyear bans of internet services such as Facebook, Instagram, and X. In the case of Myanmar, it also reflects extensive nightly internet curfews. (Notably, the Internet Society’s data, which only counts from 2018, does not track China’s 311-day internet ban in Xinjiang, one of the longest shutdowns on record, which took place between 2009 and 2010.) Palestine, which also only appears on the hourly list, has undergone more than 829 days—nearly 20,000 hours—of Israeli-imposed internet restrictions in the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
So far, Iran’s numbers are not record-shattering. This latest shutdown is still in its early stages. But with profound internal fragmentation and massive outside pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, it seems likely to continue until the protests—or the regime—capitulate.
No comments