Iran’s switch on the wall

Saturday 24 January 2026

When a state “turns off the internet”, it rarely means a single dramatic gesture like pulling a plug and plunging a nation into silence. It is usually a sequence of measures, tightened in layers: mobile data slowed where crowds gather, messaging applications throttled, international routes withdrawn, domain name services sabotaged, then finally a near-total severance of ordinary citizens from the global network. Iran’s present blackout, reported to have begun on 8 January 2026 amidst nationwide protests, fits that pattern but appears to go further, towards something more structural: a model in which international connectivity becomes a privilege and most people are confined to a domestic, state-shaped substitute. 

This matters because the internet is no longer merely a channel for speech. It is a nervous system for banking, logistics, retail, health services and the ordinary administration of modern life. Any government that repeatedly reaches for the kill switch is making a wager: that the political gain from blinding dissent outweighs the economic and administrative pain of digital self-harm. Iran has been refining that wager for years and, in the past fortnight she has tested the outer limits of it. 

The precedent: shutdowns as a tool of rule

Iran is not the first state to discover that the fastest way to disrupt protests is to disrupt coordination. Egypt’s 2011 shutdown is the classic modern example: connectivity was restored after roughly five days, long enough to hinder mobilisation but short enough to avoid permanent economic rupture. Myanmar’s military, after the 2021 coup, used repeated outages and platform blocks as a form of rolling intimidation: not a single permanent cut, but an atmosphere of uncertainty in which people never know whether communication will work when they most need it. India’s shutdown of Kashmir, which lasted 552 days in varying degrees, showed that long-duration restriction is possible when the affected region is politically isolated and the state can absorb reputational costs. 

Two further precedents are especially relevant to Iran.

First, Russia has spent years preparing legal and technical mechanisms for a “sovereign Runet”, including tests of disconnection, not necessarily to live offline permanently but to ensure that, in crisis, Moscow can control routing, filtering and internal continuity. Second, China has demonstrated that a country can remain deeply enmeshed in global trade while running a heavily filtered domestic internet, so long as the state permits selected gateways for commerce, research and officials. Iran appears to be edging towards a harsher variant of this second model: not simply filtering content, but rationing the very right to reach the world. 

What Iran is trying to achieve now

Three objectives are visible.

One is tactical: to interrupt the rapid, crowd-driven feedback loop of protest, video, outrage and renewed protest. Human rights organisations have argued that shutdowns also reduce the flow of evidence of killings and abuses, raising the costs of documentation and verification. 

The second is narrative control. If the outside world cannot see, it cannot easily calibrate its response and if Iranians cannot easily see the outside world, rumours, state television and word of mouth begin to compete on terms the regime understands.

The third is strategic: to prove that the state can maintain basic economic functionality while isolating political communication. Iran’s long-running work on a “national internet” is meant to make a blackout survivable, by keeping domestic services reachable even when international links are cut. The Guardian has reported claims that the present shutdown is the culmination of a long effort to build precisely that domestic parallel. 

This is why a modern shutdown often looks less like darkness and more like a dim, enclosed room: banks may function, government portals may function, approved local applications may function, but the windows to the wider world are bricked up.

Can Iran do this without wrecking her economy?

Only partially and only by accepting a slower, poorer version of economic life.

Iran’s economy already labours under sanctions, currency pressure and difficulty accessing global finance. Cutting ordinary firms off from international suppliers, cloud services, software updates, foreign customers, online advertising and routine communications adds another tax, paid in friction and lost time. Even a business that sells only domestically often depends on foreign-made tools and foreign-hosted infrastructure. When that vanishes, productivity collapses into improvisation.

That said, Iran can blunt some of the pain by creating exemptions. Reuters reporting suggests that some carefully filtered connectivity, sometimes described as a “filternet”, has remained or returned in limited form, with officials speaking of restoration when “security conditions” permit. The logic is familiar from other authoritarian settings: keep enough access for ministries, security bodies, major state-linked firms, selected universities and perhaps trusted commercial actors, while leaving the public on domestic rails. If international access becomes a licensing system, the regime can turn connectivity itself into patronage, rewarding compliance and punishing dissent.

In short, a total shutdown is economically brutal, but a tiered shutdown can be economically survivable, particularly for a state willing to shift the pain onto small businesses, freelancers and the urban middle class, who are often the same groups most capable of organising dissent.

How people get round a ban

No censorship regime is absolute. It is a contest between state capacity and citizen ingenuity, with the state enjoying structural advantages: she controls the major providers, the landing stations, the licensing environment and, crucially, the penalties.

Circumvention tends to fall into three broad categories.

First, evasion within the ordinary network: virtual private networks, proxies and similar tools that attempt to disguise destination and content. These are common, but they are also the easiest for a state to disrupt at scale through blocking known services, throttling encrypted traffic patterns, or pressuring providers. They also carry personal risk in jurisdictions where circumvention is criminalised or treated as evidence of disloyalty.

Second, substitution: moving communication to channels the state finds harder to police, such as physical transport of files, short-range sharing or improvised local networks. These are clumsy; but in a crackdown, clumsy can be good enough.

Third, bypass: routes that do not depend on the state’s terrestrial gateways at all. Satellite connectivity is the most prominent. Reuters has reported extensive attention on Starlink in Iran, including alleged smuggling of terminals, Iranian efforts at jamming and spoofing and the state’s interest in locating ground equipment, alongside legal penalties for use and distribution. 

Satellite internet does not magically liberate a whole population. Terminals cost money, must be imported and must be powered and concealed. Jamming can degrade performance. But even a limited number of satellite connections can matter politically, because they enable the export of images and testimony, which is often what a shutdown is meant to prevent.

It is worth noting, too, that regimes learn. If a state concludes that satellite internet is the principal leak, she will focus on enforcement against terminals, not on chasing every message.

For how long can a shutdown realistically last?

The most honest answer is: longer than citizens expect in the first week, but not forever in the form of a complete, uniform blackout.

Iran’s present case contains two different timelines.

The first is the emergency timeline. The Guardian reported that Iranian officials signalled international access might remain shut until at least Nowruz on 20 March 2026. That is the logic of crisis management: hold the line through the peak protest season, break the rhythm of mobilisation, then re-open gradually.

The second is the structural timeline. Activists and analysts cited in recent reporting argue that Iran may be attempting something closer to a permanent reconfiguration, a model in which most people do not regain ordinary global access at all, but are instead confined to domestic services while a vetted minority receive filtered international connectivity. 

Whether Iran can sustain that second timeline depends on two constraints.

One is economic. A permanently isolated public internet pushes talent and capital to leave, encourages corruption (connectivity becomes a commodity traded through connections), deters investment and degrades education and research. Even for a regime that values control over growth, there is a level of stagnation that threatens stability in other ways.

The other is technical leakage. The more valuable international connectivity becomes, the greater the incentive for a black market in access, whether through compromised corporate links, foreign roaming arrangements, smuggled hardware, or satellite terminals. Each workaround will be unevenly distributed, which is politically significant: the regime risks creating a two-tier society in which the connected elite are ever more visibly insulated from the disconnected majority.

The likely outcome, therefore, is not an Iran that lives like North Korea, entirely sealed. It is an Iran that resembles a gated community: a domesticated internet for daily life, combined with controlled gateways for the state, for favoured firms and for those willing to accept surveillance and licensing as the price of being allowed online.

That can last years in one form or another. But it is unlikely to remain a single uninterrupted national blackout. The more plausible long-term shape is intermittent crisis shutdowns, plus permanent rationing of the global web.

The deeper point: control has moved into the infrastructure

Internet shutdowns used to be a sign of panic, an admission that the state could not compete in open information space. Increasingly they are a sign of planning. Access Now has documented how common shutdowns have become globally and how they are used as a governance tool, not merely a battlefield expedient. 

Iran’s present experiment suggests something still more consequential: the idea that sovereignty in the twenty-first century can be expressed not only at borders and in laws, but in routing tables, filtering equipment and the licensing of who may speak to the world.

If that model succeeds in Iran, it will not remain an Iranian story. It will become a precedent, studied by every regime that fears its own people more than it fears economic decline.