For more than 36 hours, internet access has been largely blocked in Iran after US and Israeli strikes on the country, according to internet monitoring organisations.

As the attacks unfolded early on Saturday morning, internet connectivity in Iran dropped rapidly to about 1 per cent, according to NetBlocks, which regularly monitors global access.

“The measure limits civic engagement at a key moment for the country’s future after the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei in US and Israeli air strikes,” NetBlocks posted on X.

Initially after the US strikes on Saturday, the group reported that online connectivity in Iran dropped to just more than 50 per cent, but within a few hours it had rapidly declined to almost zero as attacks continued.

“I am not able to connect with my family at the moment,” said an expat living in Michigan who did not want to be identified with hopes of protecting his family from retaliation in Iran.

“For a few days before the attacks though, we were able to connect via phone and internet, although it was sometimes unstable,” he added.

Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic, offered insight into why this blackout was not as severe as previous shutdowns imposed by Iran’s authorities.

“Small amounts of Web and DNS traffic are still getting through, and IPv4 routes remain available suggesting some users and sites are allow-listed for access,” Cloudflare Radar posted on its X social media account.

Although not the newest internet protocol, IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) remains the main standard for enabling online communication.

Its continued availability suggests the authorities may not want a total blackout, allowing limited access for certain users.

Iran’s government has frequently imposed internet shutdowns in the past to quell protests and demonstrations.

“Iran is not just catching up, but already overtaking China in terms of online censorship,” read a statement from Amnezia, an open-source virtual private network (VPN) provider said in a statement to The National.

The company said, however, that there was still uncertainty about the precise cause of the sharp drop in traffic during the strikes.

“There is a graph from one of our servers that clearly shows a significant drop to almost zero in Amnezia traffic,” it said.

“But at the moment, it’s hard to say what exactly caused it.”

For more than a decade, demonstrators in various countries have relied on internet access to sustain momentum in efforts to challenge governments. In Iran, connectivity could prove critical.

“This is not just a traffic data,” Farzaneh Badiei, a digital governance analyst who grew up in Iran, said in a LinkedIn post.

“This is about us not being able to know if our families and friends and people are alive or dead,” she added.

In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US had secretly moved thousands of Starlink satellite internet terminals into Iran to help maintain connectivity during government-imposed blackouts.

The report said the US State Department bought at least 7,000 terminals and that President Donald Trump was aware of the effort.

Starlink consoles are banned in Iran, which prompted US efforts to smuggle the terminals in.

Due to attacks originating from Iran, internet infrastructure in several Middle East countries has also been affected.

According to Amazon Web Services, a major provider of internet systems, services in the region were affected after objects struck a data centre, “creating sparks and fire”.

AWS said it was working to fix the problem.

Source: The National 
--Agencies