Gonche Habibizad
BBC Persian Senior Reporter

This is not the first time Iranian authorities have shut down the internet in the country.

Previous examples include the 2019 fuel price protests, the 2022 Women, Lives and Freedom protests, which saw intermittent restrictions, and the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June.

NetBlocks director Alp Toker told the BBC: “There was a blackout for several years as the Iranian authorities fine-tuned their censorship mechanisms.”

“What used to be necessary to take down networks individually is now an instant, centralized process, so the concept of an Internet ‘kill switch’ is no longer metaphorical,” Toker said.

In these earlier cases, some phone service and limited VPN access were still available to a portion of the population, and overall connectivity was reported to be high.

“By the time of the 2025 Israel-Iran war blackout, and since then, the shutdowns have become faster and more comprehensive, disabling even standard phone calls. These types of shutdowns are no longer an exceptional event, but part of the everyday way connectivity is managed in Iran,” Tooker says.

In 2019 and June 2025, the connection rate dropped to approximately 4-5% and 3%, respectively.

Unlike these periods, there were no major fluctuations or temporary recovery in access during this outage.