As the war with Israel enters its sixth day, Iran’s internet connections almost completely disappeared on Wednesday, according to a web monitoring company.
NetBlocks, a company that tracks internet access around the world, wrote to X that Iran is “now in the midst of an almost nationwide internet blackout.”
The company’s ratings were confirmed by other Internet surveillance organizations.
“Data collected by IODA, a system that “monitors internet infrastructure connectivity at near real time” with the aim of identifying macroscopic internet outages, showed a sudden collapse of Iran’s internet connections on Wednesday.
David Belson, head of data insights at Internet Infrastructure Company CloudFlare, told TechCrunch that Iran’s internet traffic levels are “currently 97% lower, where it was at one time a week ago,” pointing to the company’s own data on Iran’s internet connectivity.
With Iran and Israel currently engaged in military conflicts, news of internet power outages has come. Iran has experienced several cyberattacks since the start of this latest conflict, including hacking Iran’s major banks and crypto exchanges. Following the attack, Iranian news outlet Elib said Israel had launched a “massive cyber war” against Iran, and Iranian officials reportedly began restricting the country’s access to the internet.
But it is unknown what is responsible for the collapse of Iran’s internet, Belson said.
“In a similar case of a near-complete Internet outage, it often drops simultaneously to the announced IP address space. This means that the country’s networks are no longer visible on the Internet, but in this case we didn’t see any such activity,” Belson told TechCrunch.
“We can only see a decrease in traffic. We don’t know why our data is reduced,” Belson added.
Other internet monitoring experts, including Doug Madrid, who works at Kentic, saw the same collapse.
“A lot of Iranian service providers are currently taking place offline at the second national internet blackout on many days,” writes Madrid of X. “This suspension is more serious than yesterday.”
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