Internet connectivity in Iran almost completely disappeared on Wednesday, according to web monitoring firms, as war with Israel enters its sixth day.
NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world, wrote on X that Iran is “now in the midst of a near-total national internet blackout.”
The firm’s assessment was confirmed by other internet-monitoring organizations.
Data collected by IODA, which is a system that “monitors the Internet infrastructure connectivity in near-real time, with the goal of identifying macroscopic Internet outages,” showed on Wednesday the sudden collapse of internet connectivity in Iran.
David Belson, the head of data insight at internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, told TechCrunch that internet traffic levels in Iran “are now ~97% below where they were at the same time a week ago,” and pointed to the company’s own data on Iran’s internet connectivity.
News of the internet blackouts come as Iran and Israel are currently engaged in a military conflict. Iran has also experienced several cyberattacks since the start of this latest conflict, including the hacks of a major Iranian bank and crypto exchange. Following the attacks, Iranian news outlet IRIB said Israel had launched a “massive cyber war” against Iran, and Iranian officials reportedly began restricting access to the country’s internet.
It is unclear, however, what is responsible for the collapse of Iran’s internet, said Belson.
“In similar cases of near-complete Internet outages, we often see a concurrent drop in announced IP address space, meaning that the country’s networks are no longer visible on the Internet. However, we have not seen such activity in this case,” Belson told TechCrunch.
“We can only see that the traffic dropped — the data doesn’t tell us why it dropped,” added Belson.
Other internet monitoring experts, such as Doug Madory, who works for Kentik, also saw the same collapse.
“Numerous Iranian service providers now offline in second national Internet blackout in as many days,” Madory wrote on X. “This outage is more severe than yesterday’s.”
