Iran's internet shutdown is chillingly precise and may last some time

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/10/irans-internet-shutdown-is-strikingly-sophisticated-and-may-last-some-time

by robaato • 6 months ago

79 94 6 months ago

theguardian.com

perihelions3• 6 months ago

A Time source is alleging hundreds of protestor deaths in Tehran[0]. It's a repeat of 2019 [1]; the network blocks aren't incidental, it's their purpose to create cover for coordinating massacres.

[0] https://time.com/7345092/iran-protests-death-toll-regime-cra...

"A Tehran doctor told TIME on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths, “most by live ammunition.”"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–2020_Iranian_protests

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

A dark lesson from the world. Turn off internet before shooting protesters dead.

stogot3• 6 months ago

Or if it happens before the Internet, create a Great Firewall to block and censor any mention of it. [Tianemen Square]

tsol• 6 months ago

In the USA we manage to do that without turning the internet off by just saying they were resisting the police.

9dev2• 6 months ago

So, Trump is going to go after Iran now, right? As he said he would?

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

They are going to need a large military.

By my count, Greenland, Mexico, Venezuela and Iran have all been threatened this year.

sph2• 6 months ago

I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for situations like these which are increasingly common.

Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.

Telemakhos• 6 months ago

Starlink now offers direct-to-cellphone 4G coverage, no extra equipment needed.

pelagicAustral• 6 months ago

You do still need an ISP playing ball with Starlink for that to work.

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

Musk has to agree though - and he was shutting this down at various points in Ukraine over his support for Russian.

Ideally Starlink wouldn’t be involved.

nicepost• 6 months ago

Would starlink be reliable in countries where it's leadership wasn't politically aligned though?

aspect0545• 6 months ago

Starlink is Musk. That‘s not reliable

frrn3• 6 months ago

An extremely centralized network like Starlink depending on the wishes of its owner is the opposite of freedom. We need sovereign alternatives.

girvo2• 6 months ago

It's apparently being jammed in Iran from what I've heard/read, though I don't know how reliable that is.

IlikeMadison• 6 months ago

also mesh networks

elbci• 6 months ago

mesh networks! peer-to-peer, not (oligarch/gov/corporation)-to-(gullible maneuver mass)

ninalanyon• 6 months ago

Surely the real cost of such a device is not the hardware or the software but the organizational effort required to install it and make it useful without anyone involved getting caught.

XorNot• 6 months ago

Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.

We're basically talking attritable devices being needed and protocols which make them useful - i.e. something you can release that stands a chance of getting information out before its destroyed and where the users are nowhere near it when it's launched.

EDIT: I mean realistically you basically would want to just toss a handful of cheap USB memory sticks out across a city.

So if we're being realistic it's just more USB-C OTG devices. Ideally what you want is it to become standard for USC-C memory sticks to have a USB-C port on them so they can be daisy chained and copied stick to stick if given a power source so they're easy to copy and spread.

sph2• 6 months ago

The target audience is people fighting for their lives. When you've lost connectivity and everything around you is on fire, you don't have much time to faff about with designing such a system. This is why I believe it should be a premade and tested open-source kit for preppers and people in high-risk areas.

ninjagoo7• 6 months ago

perhaps it needs to be tech that is useful in daily life, with the ability to switch channels automatically when the main isp is unavailable. An example is the HNT helium network - an alternative data transport mechanism. Not saying that is what should be used - that's a crypto thing - but the principle is the same.

thinking about it in terms of "getting caught" might be the less ideal way to approach it - think of it in terms of building a more reliable system, which is a goal everyone can get behind.

alexey-salmin• 6 months ago

Surely governments will not see any issues with this project whatsoever.

Though in US I think you can try publishing the code and blueprints as a book and claim the First Amendment, following the PGP story. May or may not work.

femto• 6 months ago

There are a number of projects that do this, using mobile phones to form ad hoc / mesh networks.

https://www.open-mesh.org/

https://briarproject.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network

The original but now defunct?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serval_Project

stogot3• 6 months ago

I assume that these are blocked by sanction-following CDN firewalls? The first link paused to “check if I’m a bot” and I’m sure they check if I’m from Iran too

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 6 months ago

https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat

Seems similar to Briar but it has an iOS client.

nomilk2• 6 months ago

Word on the street is Starlink is operational in Iran [0]. Although the article claims it's being jammed in some neighbourhoods:

Starlink was being jammed, Rashidi said, although the extent varied from one neighbourhood to another.

[0] https://x.com/WarMonitor3/status/2009729660792258805

luke5441• 6 months ago

I'd guess you can also easily track down star link terminals via drones (fly high up until you find a signal, then go lower while keeping the signal active)

nomilk2• 6 months ago

Possibly a difficult ask for a regime under fairly extreme pressure (but not impossible, for sure, and they'd only need to do it once per system).

jimnotgym5• 6 months ago

I remember hearing a report that Iran was making real progress towards safety and freedom before the war on terror led them to appoint strong men to keep them safe.

Does anyone know enough to comment?

heraldgeezer9• 6 months ago

You may be referring to Khatami’s Reforms, nevertheless. Conservative factions in Iran, including the Revolutionary Guard and unelected institutions like the Guardian Council, resisted Khatami’s reforms. They shut down reformist newspapers, jailed activists, and blocked progressive legislation. The reformist movement was gradually smothered, and by 2005, the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, reversing many of Khatami’s policies.

The loopback to "its all the wests fault anyhow" is so tiresome from people like you.

"appoint" lmao

You think since the revolution in 1979 any election has been real? Yes in b4 the Shaha was bad too. etc. waah waah.

At some point, you grow up and pick a side. Ruissia, Iran, China and rouge states, vs The West, EU and USA.

Iran is the world’s top state sponsor of terror, per the US State Department. The IRGC and Quds Force fund, arm, and direct groups like Hezbollah ($700M/year), Hamas, Houthis, and Iraqi militias. They’ve been linked to assassinations (e.g., 2011 Saudi ambassador plot), bombings (Bulgaria 2012), and cyberattacks on US/EU infrastructure. Even during economic crises, Tehran spends ~$1B annually on proxies. Recent examples: UK arrested Iranians in 2025 for plotting attacks on Israeli sites (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2wqy5ejdjo); Houthis’ Red Sea strikes use Iranian drones/missiles. Sanctions and court rulings (Khobar Towers, 9/11 facilitation) confirm their role.

lostlogin8• 6 months ago

vs The West, EU and USA.

That’s not a side anymore.

jimnotgym5• 6 months ago

The loopback to "its all the wests fault anyhow" is so tiresome from people like you

I most certainly said nothing of the sort. I watched a documentary that claimed that many years ago and I asked if it was true. Go and post your vile rubbish on Twitter

terminalshort• 6 months ago

Sounds like blame America bullshit. Not worth commenting without an actual source.

jimnotgym5• 6 months ago

Do you have sources for everything you heard a decade ago? I was hoping someone could have pointed to a balanced analysis, rather than looking for malign intent in what I said

jimnotgym5• 6 months ago

I'm going to add what I have found to answer my own question. I have found that this appears to be so divisive a subject that an internet discussion is impossible without immediate mud-slinging. The articles I have found are overtly biased in one direction or another. So I turned to wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Khatami

Read for yourself and decide 1) was Khatami a reformer, helping to make Iran a better place. I mean relatively better of course!

If you don't think he was, exit now. Now assuming you think he was, the question is did the war on terror hinder him. I'm not an academic but when the sources are obviously biased it can be instructive to see what one side is prepared to concede about the other.

Here is paper written for the US National Intelligence Committee that warns this may be an outcome

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/warterror_2001.pdf

"Two tentative, and partly contradictory, projections suggest themselves: (a) the more intense and widespread our counter-terror campaign within the Middle East, the more ammunition will the conservatives have to stoke anti-US sentiment within Iran and siphon support away from the reformist camp; "

And here is an article trying to refute that Khatami was hampered by the war on terror, by the Washington Institute for Near East policy which wikipedia says, "is a pro-Israel American think tank"

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khatami-...

Which firmly establishes that American politicians and media people were pushing the line that the Axis of Evil speech had hampered Khatami in reforming Iran. Therefore I deduce that some people were indeed stating this as a truth at the time from within mainstream America, and it is not just an anti-american conspiracy. The article tries to refute it of course, but in doing so acknowledges that it is an opinion held at the time. You read, you decide.

lucasRW7• 6 months ago

What's chilling is realizing how little the coverage of those riots is in the West. At best, the BBC is copy-pasting the statements from Khamenei.

Thanks Elon.

heraldgeezer9• 6 months ago

Hi LucasRW! Just wanted to comment on this.

Elon?

How is this Elons fault?

Starlink is the only way to get internet in Iran.

X have clips and videos posted as the few social networks that have it. This content is not suitable for instagram or facebook.

SVT (my swedish news) have had segments on this with reporters, not in the country, but she is in Lebanon. She is arab biased, but they are reporting on it.

Asmongold (worlds largest youtuber right now and an Elon fan) is one of the few having long 45min-2h segments about the Iran protests on his stream right now?

But you are so blind your kneejerk reaction is to blame Elon Musk lmao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v61Md-uIYQg

lucasRW7• 6 months ago

You misunderstood my message. I am genuinely thanking Elon, because without X and now Starlink, we indeed would have 0 knowledge of what's going no. At best, we would have the BBC and Skynews echoing Khamenei's statements.

ninjagoo7• 6 months ago

That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.

Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.

Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.

Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.

The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.

ninjagoo7• 6 months ago

There is a case to be made that overcoming oppression is extremely hard to achieve in populations over 50 million. Are there any successful examples where this has happened?

perihelions3• 6 months ago

The Soviet Union had a population larger than the United States' at the time of its collapse. North of 100 million people were liberated virtually overnight from direct Russian rule, from USSR states (over 50 million in Ukraine alone); and another 100+ million from Russian-backed communist governments in Warsaw Pact states (40 million in Poland alone).

British India (three modern states) had a population of 400 million at the time of its independence from Britain. That was famously a coordinated, nation-wide movement.

Indonesia was around 200 million people at the end of the Suharto dictatorship and its transition towards democracy.

ninjagoo7• 6 months ago

Soviet Union - was that really opposition to oppression that succeeded or the state collapsed internally - disintegrated?

British India could be good example - but there's a case to be made that it was overthrow of an external colonial rule that never integrated with the local population, so not sure there is a good parallel with the Iran situation.

Indonesia - this appears to be a really good example, along with Phillipines (1986). So what's different about Iran - why the repeated failures there?

johng• 6 months ago

I think this is one of the arguments for the 2nd amendment that too often gets overlooked. Overthrowing the government is a lot easier if the populace is legally armed AND the government doesn't know who owns what or how many guns. Which is why it is that way specifically here in the US.

ninjagoo7• 6 months ago

interesting that this item has disappeared off the front pages completely, while items with much fewer comments persist...

tim333• 6 months ago

One of the best sources on Iran seems to be the Iranian/British comedian Omid Djalili on X funnily enough. The BBC have been a bit rubbish.

heraldgeezer9• 6 months ago

Run Tor Snowflake browser extension to help internet access (I like to think it helps!)

https://snowflake.torproject.org/

Yaser_Amiri• 6 months ago

It's a blackout! meaning "IP" doesn't work any more. IP aside, even cell network and landline barely work and people can not call each other or send a SMS!

heraldgeezer9• 6 months ago

I know IP and cell is down. Starlink works. Just suggesting.

WhereIsTheTruth• 6 months ago

So we are censoring comments we don't like? Iran? No, right here in the West

Comment in question:

It's ironic to watch the contradictions unfold

On one hand, nobody actually knows what's happening in Iran, yet everyone has a rock solid opinion, complete with intricate details, as if they'd just left a classified briefing

On the other hand, those same confident voices all want the same thing: a leader who'll privatize Iran's oil for Western companies, align with US policy, open markets to Western finance, and prioritize defense contracts over local development

Funny how that works

Some random farmer from Ohio is obsessed with Iran for some reason

appreciatorBus• 6 months ago

The vast majority of people cheering on Iranian protesters don’t know anything about Ian’s oil. The see people in the street protesting their theocratic regime and they cheer them on. To imagine that these voices are all just oil puppets is the stuff of leftist group think.

Your comment wasn’t censored, your fellow readers flagged it because they thought it was bullshit.

_DeadFred_• 6 months ago

Iran was executing women for not wearing hats. That is what the flyover people around me know about Iran and is enough for them to think they'd be OK with the theocratic regime gone.

dismalaf• 6 months ago

It's as simple as: Iranians don't want a theocratic dictatorship that oppresses women and funds terrorism worldwide. Almost anything is better than Iran's current government so anyone who loves freedom even a tiny bit should cheer them on.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683

Iran's internet shutdown is chillingly precise and may last some time

Related Stories