Iran first imposed a near-total communications blackout on the third day of protests that swept the country in January, and restrictions were further tightened after war against the United States and Israel started.

This is a familiar tool deployed by Iran’s clerical regime, which has a history of shutting down the internet to suppress protests and silence dissent: in 2019during demonstrations against the increase in fuel prices; in 2022during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement after the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini; and again in January this yearas anti-government protests spread from Tehran to towns and cities across the country.

Iran also shut down communications during the 12-day war with Israel in the summer of 2025, citing national security as a justification.

The regime used the same tactics to start the current war, which began on February 28. More than six weeks ago, it stays in place and became the longest internet blackout in Iran’s history, leaving most Iranians with little access to state-controlled domestic networks and state media.

Cloudflare data showed that internet traffic dropped to almost zero during the January shutdown, while NetBlocks and other monitors said the blackout imposed since the US-Israeli attack began kept connectivity at a fraction of normal levels.

The government’s reasons are familiar: regime supporters say that foreign agents, Israeli Mossad spies and government opponents go online to send videos and images of sensitive military and state sites abroad.

But the restrictions have far-reaching consequences beyond protecting national security or silencing dissent. They have left businesses dysfunctional, families cut off from each other and large parts of the country trapped inside a censored information system, which the Iranian public largely distrusts.

An era of ‘digital apartheid’

Some still manage to connect to the world wide web, but only through more risky and expensive solutions.

At the height of the protests in January, reports emerged that Elon Musk’s Starlink had become a vital lifeline for some users, even as Iranian authorities stepped up jamming and other efforts to disrupt the service.

As the crackdown deepens, black market access to Starlink equipment is reportedly becoming more difficult and more expensive.

Residents inside Iran say the economics of access have become irrational. According to several people DW spoke to, Starlink kits that once sold for around $1,000 (about €844) on the black market are now going for over $5,000.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) still exist, but often at prices beyond the reach of most Iranians. One source described paying up to 1 million tomans ($12.60 or €10.68 to $16.00 or €13.57) per gigabyte for unstable filtered access.

In a country where the minimum monthly wage is around 16 million tomans, internet access has become a luxury beyond the reach of most Iranians.

A resident inside Iran told DW that the country has entered “a digital apartheid era.” They say the state has effectively made connection with the outside world a privilege distributed by class and loyalty.

“If you are a university faculty, a pro-government journalist or part of an online propaganda project, you get access to the internet,” they said. “If you’re rich, you buy an expensive VPN. But if you’re ordinary, your share is the national internet and a high wall of censorship.”

Online work is gone

A resident of Tehran who used to run an online shop on Instagram told DW that the closure effectively ended their business. “With the internet cut, I can no longer work,” they said. “I lost my savings, and it also affected my life with my wife, because she also uses Instagram to advertise her work.”

Buying a VPN doesn’t solve the problem, the source added, because customers themselves often can’t get online. “No use,” they said. “Although I was able to connect, my customers were not.”

That encapsulates the deeper problem with long-term internet shutdowns: they don’t just prevent someone from working, they break the network of relationships that make online work possible in the first place.

Economist Hassan Mansur told DW that the scale of the economic damage is already huge. He said Iran’s official figures put the daily loss from the shutdown at around $37.7 million.

He added that the lost revenue from Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp in January alone was estimated at $185 million, and that almost 70% of all businesses in Iran were affected in some way by the internet disruption.

“The fall in revenue for online businesses is estimated to be between 50 and 90%,” he said, adding that some businesses were lost entirely.

The Chinese model – no infrastructure in China

The Iranian state argues that the domestic intranet is sufficient and that people can still communicate on local platforms. But that argument was met with deep public skepticism.

Many Iranians say they don’t trust government-backed messaging apps, fearing they could be monitored or directly accessed by security services. That mistrust is reinforced by repeated accounts of arrests linked to digital surveillance.

Saeed Sozangar, a digital rights activist and network security guru, wrote to X that intelligence agents had access to his WhatsApp chats while they were arresting him. “While they were beating me, they said: ‘What do you want to say that you said? From here from Telegram? Do you think it’s safe there?’ he charged.

Mansur argued that Iran is trying to imitate China closed internet model while lacking the technological ecosystem to replace the open web.

“Unlike China, Iran does not have strong domestic search engines, cloud systems or national social platforms,” ​​he told DW. That leaves the state trying to force people into an internal network that is weaker, less reliable and less accessible than the global internet it is meant to replace.

The result is not digital autonomy in the Chinese sense – it is digital deprivation.

Isolation, anger and a reduction in public space

The shutdown also changed how information reached people inside Iran.

While global internet access is disappearing, satellite television has become one of the few remaining ways that many households can still get outside news. At the same time, interference with satellite signals also makes that route less reliable.

Some Persian-language media outlets abroad responded by reviving shortwave broadcasts, a reminder that in moments of deep censorship, technology can work backwards as well as forwards.

That narrowing path has political consequences. It makes it harder for Iranians to verify claims, harder for outside media to hear directly from people on the ground, and easier for the state to impose its own narrative.

The government insists that the blackout is necessary for national security. But for many Iranians, the shutdown has become yet another sign that the regime is willing to do anything to protect itself, even at the expense of Iranians.

Edited by: Karl Sexton