Iran’s internet goes dark amid mass protests, reports of violent government response

Outages hit Russia and Ukraine, too

The authors of a hypothetical manual containing procedures repressive governments can use to stay in power despite restive populations would surely devote its first chapter to turning off the internet, an action the government of Iran appears to have taken in the last 24 hours.

According to NetBlocks, network connectivity in Iran dropped to almost zero on January 8th.

“Live metrics show Iran is now in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout; the incident follows a series of escalating digital censorship measures targeting protests across the country and hinders the public's right to communicate at a critical moment,” the organization wrote, later updating its analysis to suggest the outage has persisted for at least twelve hours and saw “connectivity flatlining at ~1% of ordinary levels.”

Cloudflare’s Radar service records internet traffic in Iran dropping by nearly 90 percent within 30 minutes. The company says the outage is “government directed.”

Both firms currently report near-zero traffic in Iran, and that the country is cut off from the global internet.

Numerous news reports assert Iran’s government imposed the outages to make it harder for citizens to communicate, amid massive anti-government protests across the country. Cutting off internet access also means it will be harder for Iranians to share footage of the reportedly violent government response to protests.

Iran’s government has cut off the internet before. In 2019 it imposed a ban to quell protests, and in 2025 the purpose of a country-wide outage was preventing cyber-attacks a few days before joint US/Israeli missile strikes on Iran.

NetBlocks has also spotted what it described as “a major disruption to networks in Belgorod, western Russia” that it says was the result of missile strikes by Ukraine. On Thursday, the downtime detectives also found “a major decline in internet connectivity in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts of Ukraine,” attributed the incident to “a series of Russian drone attacks on energy targets,” and cited a statement from Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy that says energy workers performed emergency restoration works overnight. ®