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Iran’s Internet Access Has Been Cut for 1,000 Hours

On April 12, Iran’s internet blackout entered its 44th day, meaning Iranians had been cut off from the internet for more than 1,000 hours, causing further economic harm to the nation. Even before the current blackout was imposed, Iranians had been suffering from widespread connectively outages throughout most of January this year, when a similar shutdown was introduced by authorities during anti-government protests. The longest national outage ever is thought to have been in Libya during the Arab Spring in 2011, when connectivity was lost for nearly six months.

Released on 04/13/2026

Transcript

[Reporter] Iran's internet access

has been cut for 1,000 hours.

The regime-imposed total internet blackout began shortly

after US and Israeli strikes against Iran on February 28th.

According to NetBlocks,

when the shutdown entered its 37th day on April 5th,

it became the longest nation scale internet blackout

in any country since the internet monitoring group

was founded in 2017.

Over the past decade,

the regime in Iran has developed a technical, legal,

and surveillance infrastructure to suppress its citizens.

Multiple internet shutdowns in 2019, 2022, 2025,

and twice this year already

have demonstrated more sophisticated blocking techniques.

While Iranians have built and refined a playbook

for staying online as much as possible

during partial blackouts,

such as via VPNs and other proxy networks,

these aren't accessible during total shutdowns.

Only the Iranian government, military,

and wealthy elites currently have access

to the outside internet,

while Iranian citizens are deprived

of accurate news about the war,

and prevented from contacting family and loved ones.

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