Iran’s Internet Blackout by the Numbers

Last Thursday, Iran initiated a near-total internet blackout in response to anti-government protests that first began in December and have since rapidly grown nationwide, becoming the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic in years. Within a half-hour of the digital shutdown, internet traffic plummeted by 90 percent. In the following days, internet connectivity has since been close to zero percent, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis database.

Compared with previous internet shutdowns in Iran, the present one is considerably more extreme. For the first time ever, the government has blocked access to Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider that helped keep civilians online during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022.

Last Thursday, Iran initiated a near-total internet blackout in response to anti-government protests that first began in December and have since rapidly grown nationwide, becoming the biggest threat to the Islamic Republic in years. Within a half-hour of the digital shutdown, internet traffic plummeted by 90 percent. In the following days, internet

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