During the January 8–9, 2026 protests, following the call to action by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the Islamic Republic shut down the internet completely. This total blackout continued for days. In the first days, the entire country was effectively paralyzed, to the point that even POS devices stopped working.

After some time, they whitelisted internal communications so the banking system and other essential functions could continue operating. But ordinary Iranians’ access to the global internet remained totally blocked, and even the comment sections of major Iranian shopping platforms were shut down. For example, the government ordered the comments sections of Digikala and Divar — platforms comparable to Amazon and OLX in Iran — to be disabled. People could not even voice their opinions on the regime-approved internal platforms through comments!

This shows the extent to which they fear people’s voices being heard. Since the internet became widespread in Iran, every wave of protests has been met with major internet restrictions and mass censorship of foreign social platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. Since November 2019, shutting down the entire internet has become a more “normal” defense mechanism for the Islamic Republic. Each internet blackout has coincided with large-scale massacres. During the first nationwide blackout in 2019, they killed over 1,500 people.

During the January 8–9, 2026 massacre, the internet blackout was far more intense than before. Not only did foreign platforms become instantly inaccessible, but even internal connections were shut down. This was a total blackout in which not even a single kilobyte of data could be transferred through Iranian telecom networks — a complete and absolute shutdown.

The only channels through which footage of the massacre and overcrowded morgues emerged were the small number of people who had access to Starlink.

Since this total blackout disrupted everything — including banking transactions and even parts of the regime’s own internal communications, because modern infrastructure depends heavily on internet connectivity — they could not sustain it for more than several days. In the meantime, instead of focusing on defending against potential foreign attacks, they redirected engineering resources toward developing a more sophisticated instant-blackout system for the public while keeping government infrastructure operational.

It also became common practice that, even during total blackouts, regime officials and politicians still had access to the internet and continued posting on X daily. This trend continued after the January 8–9 protests and the post-war internet blackout. Over time, they began distributing “white SIM cards” to members of their propaganda apparatus. These were SIM cards with uncensored internet access that only top officials and regime mouthpieces were allowed to use.

Ordinary people now have no access to major social media platforms and are increasingly forced to use regime-sponsored applications such as Bale, a heavily controlled and highly restricted messaging app intended to replace WhatsApp and Telegram.

During the total internet blackout, when no data could be transferred between people, it was impossible to bypass restrictions through VPNs from inside Iran. But once the regime partially restored the so-called “national internet” — which is truly not the Internet, but an intranet — people with Starlink access inside Iran became capable of creating VPN access points that connected others to the global internet. In practice, this meant that either you had to be part of the regime’s privileged class to enjoy tiered internet access, or you had to pay through the nose for VPN services connected through privately operated Starlink terminals inside Iran.

Recently, a few days after the announcement of the ceasefire between the US-Israel coalition and Iran, the Islamic Republic began selling KYC-linked access to a less censored version of the internet, allowing access to platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram. They refer to this as “Pro Internet” access, where citizens must pay extra and pass an approval process to regain access to services they had before the war. Given the Islamic Republic’s track record, the moment another missile is fired, even users approved for these “Pro SIM cards” will immediately lose access as well.