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For a long time, the Iranian government has treated free internet access as a privilege that is extended by the state to those willing to carry its message and withheld from everyone else. Around four hours after Israeli and American strikes began, internet traffic collapsed by 98 percent — a near-total blackout. Iran’s communications infrastructure was deliberately dismantled by the government and internet traffic was completely halted. The strikes were made by the Iranian government’s adversaries aimed at military installations, capabilities, and senior political and military leadership. The internet blackout was imposed by the government, aimed at the Iranian people. Millions of volunteers around the world came to help the users inside Iran by quietly donating their own bandwidth.
This pattern is well-established by now: During the 12-day war in June 2025, an almost identical shutdown was imposed for roughly half of the conflict’s duration. As security forces unleashed a violent crackdown on the latest round of protests in Iran, authorities severed internet access. Internet was completely cut off on Jan. 8, 2026. Restrictions eased slightly on Jan. 28, but the relief was partial: severe limitations remained. When the Feb. 28 strikes came, the government drove connectivity down once more — this time to near-total darkness.
Each time, the official rationale was national security — cutting connectivity to deny adversaries targeting intelligence and blunt incoming cyberattacks. The internet blackout did not limit the military capabilities of Iran’s adversaries in any meaningful way. What it did — reliably, deliberately, every time — was cut citizens off from the outside world, conceal atrocities, and sever the ties between Iranians inside the country and those beyond its borders.
From the outset of this crisis, both Israel and the United States cited the oppression of the Iranian people as one of their justifications for military action. Yet the terms of the ceasefire that was announced on Apr. 8, 2026, have only covered missiles, nuclear facilities, and regional proxies. Internet access for 90 million Iranians was not among them. No government demanded it. No government acted as though the blackout was its problem to solve. As the blackout stretched on, an Iranian user wrote in Farsi on X: “One day after reaching the Moon, NASA astronauts were able to speak with their families. At the same moment, the people of Iran — for over a month, because of the oppression of the Islamic Republic — have been cut off from seeing and speaking with their own families. They have no internet access.”
For the Islamic Republic, the internet is a political threat to be managed, and a population’s connection to the outside world is a vulnerability to be closed. What has received far less attention is what happened on the other side of that firewall: thousands of diaspora members who, long before the strikes began, had already built the infrastructure to fight back.
Through volunteer proxy networks — specifically Psiphon’s Conduit and the Tor Project’s Snowflake — diaspora members across Europe and North America transformed their personal devices into bridges. The mechanics are simple enough for anyone to participate. Conduit runs quietly in the background of a phone or laptop, sharing a portion of the user’s bandwidth. When Iranian users inside the country use Psiphon’s network to try to connect, their encrypted traffic is routed through these volunteer devices as stepping stones before reaching the broader network. Snowflake works through a browser extension on the same principle: connections routed through ordinary residential addresses that constantly change, making them nearly impossible for authorities to block en masse. Neither tool requires technical expertise. The demand they met was extraordinary. Within days of the blackout, these circumvention tools had become a mass survival behavior of Iranian users, cutting across demographics and geographies. Following the internet restrictions imposed since the beginning of 2026, Psiphon alone peaked at nearly 9.6 million daily Iranian users, and Conduit reported more than 5 million users in Iran on Feb. 27. More than 10 percent of Iran’s entire population had turned to these circumvention tools — a scale that leaves little doubt about how far ordinary Iranians will go to stay connected to the world.
There are real limits to what these bandwidth-sharing services can achieve. Conduit and Snowflake both require an active internet connection to function. When Iranian authorities exercise their ultimate tool — a full network shutdown — volunteer bridges become useless regardless of how many thousands of people worldwide are ready to share their bandwidth. Estimates of how many Starlink terminals have been smuggled into Iran vary widely. Figures range from 50,000 to over 100,000, though the true number remains unverified. What is not contested is the broader point: Even at the upper end of those estimates, satellite connectivity reaches a vanishingly small fraction of a population of more than 90 million people, concentrated heavily in Tehran and well beyond the reach of most Iranians.
The technological sophistication of circumvention tools and the bandwidth sharing volunteers cannot, in the end, overcome a government’s decision to simply turn off the lights. Moreover, possession of Starlink carries severe legal consequences for Iranians. The Islamic Republic passed a law in 2025 that criminalizes possession and use of Starlink. Personal use alone carries up to two years in prison, and distribution or import for sale extends that to five. If the authorities determine that use was intended to challenge the state or constitutes espionage, the penalty is death.
The bandwidth sharing systems display how many people are routing through a user’s connection, at any given time, and how many have been helped in each passing 24 hours. The technology maintains complete anonymity — volunteers cannot see who is connecting or from where. But volunteers across the world — many of them Iranians in diaspora — understood that the numbers rising on their dashboards almost certainly represented people inside Iran: someone accessing news their government wanted hidden, a student doing research, or a person trying to reach family overseas.
While millions inside Iran were reaching for any connection they could find, the regime was simultaneously deciding who should be granted one. In early March 2026, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani announced that internet access had been provided to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” She did not specify which individuals or groups. The mechanism, however, was not new. Unfiltered internet access has long been distributed in Iran through so-called “white SIM cards” to selected journalists, members of parliament, and others attached to state institutions.
The existence of this two-tier system had been an open secret for years, but it took a minor technical feature on a social media platform to turn it into undeniable public evidence. X’s location display feature, introduced in late November 2024, was designed to distinguish genuine accounts from those operating through virtual private networks or falsified locations. Users connecting through virtual private networks — as the vast majority of Iranians must, given that X is blocked — showed a foreign country as their location. But a number of accounts registered as posting from Iran, meaning their users were accessing the platform directly, without circumvention tools. When Iranians began cross-referencing those accounts with their owners’ identities, what emerged was a roster of senior government officials, state media figures, and security-adjacent personalities enjoying unrestricted access to a platform blocked for everyone else.
Those who could be relied upon to amplify the government’s narrative have been privileged with connectivity, while ordinary Iranians are not. Iranian citizens at large are left with access only to a degraded domestic intranet modelled loosely on China’s Great Firewall, where basic global services are unavailable, and what remains is tightly controlled by the state.
On the other side of this war are Israeli citizens under Iranian missile fire who have access to the Home Front Command alert system. It is a network of mobile applications and cell broadcast technology that pushes real-time warnings directly to phones, specifying the threat and giving residents seconds to reach shelter. The Gulf Cooperation Council governments (i.e., United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain) have also activated their own emergency alert systems from the first hours of the conflict to protect their citizens during this war. Bahrain activated its air raid alert system and sent interior ministry warnings directly to residents’ mobile phones. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry triggered its national warning system, broadcasting alerts to residents and instructing them to stay calm and seek the nearest safe space. In the United Arab Emirates, loud alarm tones are sent to mobile phones with instructions to seek immediate cover. In Kuwait, civil defense alarms are activated during attacks from Iran. The system includes a tiered siren network, with distinct alarm signals calibrated to different threat levels and the corresponding responses required from the public. Qatar has taken similar measures since the early hours of the crisis. Saudi Civil Defense has also issued clear instructions and a mobile application for warnings during emergencies.
Iranian authorities have established no equivalent. While bombs fall from outside, the Iranian government wages a parallel war from within against its own population’s access to the world. With no official warning system in place, internet was the only mechanism through which civilians could track where strikes were falling, locate medical services, or find shelter. The domestic intranet that remains accessible offers none of this. It is a closed loop of state-approved content, built for control, not for civilian protection. Under a complete internet blackout, Iranian citizens have been left to navigate an active war zone without access to real-time information about their own safety.
In the absence of any official warning system, a group of digital rights activists and engineers called Holistic Resilience built Mahsa Alert — a crowdsourced mapping platform available as a website and on iOS and Android— to fill the void the Iranian government left. The app is named after Mahsa Amini, whose death in 2022 sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It is designed to work offline and uses open source intelligence and crowdsourced tips to map confirmed strike locations, hospitals, blood banks, shelters, and government checkpoints. The Iranian government has responded by accusing volunteers of spying for Israel and the United States, and has attempted both to hack the platform and to flood it with misinformation to undermine its credibility. Like the bandwidth-sharing volunteers, the team behind Mahsa Alert are Iranians in diaspora. Such initiatives are manifestation of a form of civic ingenuity that has consistently outpaced any organized international response.
As noted, satellite connectivity and circumvention tools could help Iranians under blackout, but they remain out of reach for the vast majority as they are too expensive, too legally dangerous, or simply unavailable at the scale the crisis demands. The Iranian government has long treated information as an instrument of power: deciding not just what its population is allowed to say, but what it is allowed to know. The war has exposed the full weight of that calculation. Iranians are facing bombardment from the outside, and a communications blackout from within, stripped of the most basic tool any civilian in a war zone requires: the ability to know where danger is coming from, and where to run.
The blackout that began on Feb. 28 has now surpassed every previous shutdown in Iran’s recorded history. With more than 456 hours of severed international connectivity, it has overtaken even the weeks-long blackout imposed during the January protests.
Since the beginning of this crisis, President Trump and Secretary Rubio had spoken several times about the regime’s oppression of its own citizens. But nowhere in the reported terms of the recent ceasefire negotiations is a demand for restoration of internet access in Iran, or ending of the two-tier system that gives connectivity to regime loyalists, or decriminalization of Starlink internet.
Starlink terminals, which can bypass blackouts, remain smuggled contraband in Iran. Those possessing and distributing them risk imprisonment. The hardware is expensive. The subscription fees are beyond the reach of most Iranians, whose purchasing power has been gutted by sanctions and inflation. SpaceX offered no fee waiver during this crisis. No government organized a subsidized distribution program. No coalition of democracies that spent weeks discussing Iran’s military capabilities spent equivalent energy on how to get a satellite dish to a civilian in Tehran who needed to know where the bombs were falling.
The volunteer bandwidth-sharing networks filled some of that void, built entirely by ordinary people acting without government coordination or funding. Yet the systematic deprivation of Iranians’ right to access information remains absent from the agenda of governments that claim to act in their interest.
The Islamic Republic has spent decades building an internet designed to serve the state — to surveil, to silence, and when necessary, to shut down entirely. The events of the past months have exposed the full human cost of that design. When bombs fall, and civilians need to know where to run, the infrastructure built for control has nothing to offer them. The government has shown no willingness to build warning systems or restore connectivity. Bandwidth-sharing volunteers watching connection numbers climb on their dashboards have filled a small segment of that void. But the scale of that response, which captures only around 10 percent of the population, also measures the depth of the challenge that the Iranian users are facing.
At the moment of greatest danger, the Iranian government has built a cage for the Iranians rather than a shelter. Iran’s internet architecture endangers its citizens. The United States, which justified its military intervention partly on the grounds of Iranian oppression, should make the restoration of internet access explicit in its demands in any negotiation with the Islamic Republic. European governments, which stood apart from the military campaign while invoking human rights as a core foreign policy value, have no credible reason to remain silent on a blackout of this magnitude. They also must make internet freedom a condition of any diplomatic or economic engagement with Tehran. Moreover, technology companies like Starlink can provide Iranians with subsidized terminals and fee waivers. The infrastructure to help Iranians exists. What has been missing is the will to use it.
Sara Bazoobandi, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute and a non-resident researcher at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. She was previously a Marie Curie fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, a senior lecturer at Regent’s University London, and a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on autocratic applications of AI, AI governance, cybersecurity, and cyber-enabled repression and influence operations in the Middle East. She is a member of DigiTraL project at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, where she examines various aspects of technology governance in the Middle East and North Africa. She has also worked on Iran’s economic diversification and resilience mechanisms.
Image: Mohammadreza Abbasi via Wikimedia Commons
