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‘Military grade’ signal jamming is reportedly being used to cripple the satellite constellation’s effectiveness

Today, Iran is heading into the fourth day of complete internet shutdown, which human rights agencies say is being used to mask the violent suppression of protestors.

On December 28 last year, rapid hyperinflation of the Iranian rial saw shopkeepers implement a general strike, which soon spiralled into nationwide protests. With demonstrations gaining momentum at the start of 2026, the state implemented a nationwide internet blackout on January 8.

These measures coincided with violent crackdowns on protesters by government troops, with security forces opening fire on unarmed civilians on Friday.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency reports 544 deaths since the protests began, with over 10,600 people having also been arbitrarily detained.

The blackout itself has seen Iran’s internet traffic plummet. According to internet traffic observation company NetBlocks, Iran has seen a 98% drop in connectivity to the outside world.

The shutdown was largely facilitated by Iran’s Telecommunication Infrastructure Company (TIC), which controls Iran’s international gateways. The company has issued “withdrawal” messages to global routers, effectively making Iranian IP addresses unreachable from outside the country.

Mobile services from the likes of MCI and Irancell have also been frozen.

Internet shutdowns by authoritarian regimes are commonplace; the Taliban, for example, imposed a two-day blackout back in September, ostensibly to ‘prevent immorality’. These measures are typically heavy-handed and indiscriminate, generally impacting everyone in the affected area. As such, these shutdowns are rarely maintained for long, since doing so brings the area to a grinding halt.

The blackout in Iran, is somewhat more sophisticated, with some high-ranking officials, members of state-run media services, and members of critical businesses reportedly been issued whitelisted SIM cards, which retain access to the internet through dedicated channels. This allows state propaganda to continue to be broadcast; the X (Twitter) profile for Iran’s head of state, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, for example, remained heavily active late last week.

Iran has long been working towards building an internal internet service akin to that China’s ‘Great Firewall’, which cuts off users’ access to major Western platforms like Googe, Facebook, and YouTube, allowing for greater levels of censorship and media control. While the country’s existing internet architecture is not quite so pervasive, it could still allow for a more stratified shutdown, which analysts suggest could extend its duration.

“If they end up implementing a whitelist, and it works as planned it may enable them to operate in some kind of degraded state for an extended period of time,” internet analyst Doug Madory told The Guardian. “What they’re doing is trying to set this up so that they don’t have to turn everything back on. They want just the bare necessities to be able to communicate and then shut everything else off.”

But while government propagandising may be able to proceed uninhibited, the day-to-day operation of the country’s economy is at a standstill. From digital point-of-sale transactions in local shops, to services like hospitals and schools,

“This ‘kill switch’ approach comes at a staggering price, draining $1.56 million from Iran’s economy every single hour the internet is down,” Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN, told Forbes.

Efforts to circumvent the blackout via Elon Musk’s satellite service Starlink are also proving unsuccessful. During protests in 2022, Starlink served as a major lifeline for Iranian protestors, being widely used to communicate during blackouts. As a result, reports suggest that tens of thousands of Starlink terminals have been smuggled into the country in recent years to counter government control.

The same report, however, says that Starlink is being effectively blocked by the government, potentially by ‘military grade’ jammers. Around 30% of Starlink’s Iranian traffic was disrupted in the early hours of the protests, later rising to over 80%.

Today, Iran’s foreign minister has told foreign diplomats that the internet shutdown has helped bring the protests “under total control”, though messages and video content emerging from Tehran shows that the protests are ongoing.

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