Internet blackout leaves anxious Iranians in the dark

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PARIS — Iran's internet is still "around 1 percent of ordinary levels", monitor Netblocks said on Thursday, leaving most Iranians struggling to access independent news or communicate with the outside world.

Iranian authorities shut off internet access on Saturday after Israel and the United States began air strikes, plunging the country into an information blackout.

"Iran's internet blackout has now exceeded 120 hours with connectivity still flatlining around 1 percent of ordinary levels," internet monitor Netblocks said in a message posted on social media platform X on Thursday.

Some Iranians are finding brief moments of the day when they are able to connect and send messages, while others have resorted to using illegal Starlink subscriptions, the Elon Musk-owned satellite-based internet provider.

Calls to Iran from overseas to mobile phones or landlines are near impossible.

"The internet speed is very slow," a Tehran resident told AFP by message, asking to remain anonymous for security reasons. "You can't call, and voice messages don't get delivered. We can just text."

Netblocks said that Iranian telecoms companies were now sending messages to "threaten users who try to connect to the global internet with legal action."

Iran shut off the internet for several weeks during mass nationwide protests in January and also cut it during a 12-day war with Israel last June.

"The internet situation here is abysmal," a resident in Bukan in western Iran, who asked not to be named, said in a message sent to AFP. "It connects and disconnects. The connection is slow, so the VPNs don't work."

In normal circumstances, Iranians use VPNs to connect to Western internet services such as Instagram that are banned in Iran.

Others with working internet connections are helping out others.

Shima, a 33-year-old in Tehran, told AFP that she was helping friends by sending news of life in the capital, which has been hit by waves of missile and bombing strikes since Saturday.

"I need to call a lot of people, even strangers, on behalf of their families," she said.

On Iran's borders, weary travellers who are fleeing to safety said they had to travel without any internet connection or access to phone navigation services such as Google Maps.