Iran's wartime blackout: 88 days cut off from the world

On 28 February 2026, within hours of the first Israeli and US strikes on Iran, the country was cut off from the internet. It stayed that way for 88 days. When NetBlocks saw connections come back on 26 May, it called it the longest nationwide internet shutdown in modern history: 2,093 hours of near-total isolation for a country of about 90 million people.

Before the war: a country already restricted

Iran has cut the internet before: for about a week during the fuel protests of November 2019, and again during the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025. In 2026 the war blackout followed only weeks after another one: on 8 January, during nationwide protests, the authorities switched off internet and phone lines across the country. That shutdown lasted about 20 days. When it was relaxed on 28 January, much of the access that came back worked through a whitelist of approved websites.

What happened

• 28 Feb Israeli and US strikes on Iran begin. NetBlocks reports connectivity falling to 4% of ordinary levels. Iranians abroad say they cannot reach their families, not even through the Iranian domestic network.
• March Connectivity stays at about 1% of normal for the whole month (NetBlocks). People rely on Starlink where they can get it, while the authorities jam satellite signals and seize dishes. A crowdsourced site and app, Mahsa Alert, fills in for the missing missile warnings.
• Early April Some Iranians travel to the Turkish border to get online. Police arrest people for selling VPN access.
• 8–12 Apr A ceasefire is agreed on 8 April, but the internet stays off. The blackout passes 1,000 hours on 11 April; on 12 April an Iranian official says there is no timeline for restoring it.
• 21 Apr Day 53 in a row, by then already the longest nationwide shutdown on record. Access is being restored for "favoured groups" (businesses, officials, vetted users), while most people stay disconnected.
• Late April Officials close to President Pezeshkian and citizens' groups object publicly to plans for "tiered internet": different levels of access depending on who you are.
• 25–26 May Pezeshkian orders the blackout to end. On 26 May NetBlocks confirms a partial restoration on day 88, after 2,093 hours. Service comes back slow and filtered, at roughly the restricted level of before the war.

How you cut off a country without switching it off

Iran's shutdowns do not look like Egypt's in 2011, when the country's networks simply vanished from the internet's routing tables. Iran keeps a domestic network, the National Information Network, that banks, government services and Iranian apps run on. During the blackout the links to the rest of the world were closed, while parts of that domestic network kept working (they were also cut in the first days of the January shutdown). Access was then handed back step by step through whitelists: approved sites, approved users.

That has a side effect for anyone measuring it: Iran's networks mostly stay announced to the rest of the internet, so a monitor that only looks at routing sees little. The IODA alerts we imported for this period are almost all routing alerts, and most of them show Iran's routes at 96–99% of normal, with a few short dips to about 82% in March. What disappeared was the traffic, not the routes. That is why outage monitors combine several signals: routing, whether hosts answer, and traffic seen by big networks such as Cloudflare.

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The cost

Since May: waiting for the next one

The access that came back in May was filtered, and it has stayed that way. Businesses were offered a separate, less restricted "Pro internet" as an emergency measure, while ordinary users kept the restrictions: the tiered internet that officials had argued about in April. Deputy communications minister Ehsan Chitsaz has said that restricting ordinary users keeps weakening demand and hurting business.

On 21 October the Iranian economic news site Zoomon reported that unnamed "higher authorities" had issued a binding directive: if the war resumes, international internet access is to be cut immediately. Zoomon did not publish the document or say who issued it, and the authorities have not confirmed it. The same day, former communications minister Ahmad Motamedi said that wartime shutdowns are decided by the Supreme National Security Council and that government bodies must carry out its decision; he did not confirm the directive. Earlier in October, deputy minister Vahid Yazdanian had said the decision was not his to make, pointing to President Pezeshkian's position that a shutdown needs his approval.

What Blackout Map shows

Our own probes started in October 2026, after this blackout, so they did not measure it. Our archive does hold IODA's alerts for Iran and the Internet Society's shutdown record. Internet Society Pulse lists one national shutdown in Iran running from 8 January to 26 May 2026, with the January protests as its cause: it counts the whitelisted months between the two blackouts as part of the same restriction. Today we check 128 hosts in 31 Iranian networks every five minutes, and on 23 October all of them answered as usual. Because Iran's blackouts cut the traffic rather than the routes, this is the kind of signal that shows them: if international access is cut again, those hosts stop answering us and the map shows it within minutes. See Iran right now and its outage history.

Sources

• NetBlocks: partial restoration on day 88, after 2,093 hours (26 May 2026)
• UPI: Iran's internet restored for some after 88 days of blackout
• The National: internet restored to tens of millions in Iran after three-month blackout
• RFE/RL: Iran restoring internet, with limits, after 88-day blackout
• Wikipedia: 2026 Internet blackout in Iran
• Iran's January 2026 internet shutdown: public data, censorship methods and circumvention (arXiv)
• Internet Society Pulse: internet shutdowns
• NIAC Iran Unfiltered: report of new wartime internet shutdown order revives debate over access in Iran (23 October 2026)