Iran, November 2019: a country offline for a week

In November 2019 a sudden rise in petrol prices brought Iranians onto the streets. Within a day, the government cut the country off from the internet almost completely, for about a week. It was one of the most complete shutdowns ever recorded in a large country.

What happened

• 15 Nov 2019 Protests began after the fuel price increase.
• 16 Nov, evening Connectivity collapsed. NetBlocks measured national connectivity falling to about 5% of normal, and the big mobile operators, MCI, Irancell and Rightel, went offline. NetBlocks called it the most severe disconnection it had tracked, in its technical complexity and breadth.
• 21 Nov onwards Access returned in stages: fixed lines first in Tehran and some provinces, mobile data much later. By 23 November, about a week in, connectivity was back to roughly two thirds of normal.

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Why it mattered

Iran did not simply pull the plug. It kept its domestic network, the "National Information Network", partly running: banks, government services and some local apps kept working while the connection to the rest of the world was gone. That showed a new model of shutdown, where a country stays online inside but goes dark to the outside, and it hid much of what happened during the crackdown from the world.

What Blackout Map would show

Iran is one of the countries we watch most closely. Our probes would see almost every Iranian host stop answering, IODA would see the drop in its own measurements, and Iran would turn black within minutes. Our website checks add a second view: the most visited sites hosted inside Iran would go unreachable from abroad all at once, even if people inside the country could still reach some of them. See Iran's outage history.

Sources

• TechCrunch: Iran shuts down country's internet
• Al Jazeera: Iran loosens internet restrictions
• MIT Technology Review: Iran has shut off internet access
• NetBlocks