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Comment by n-i-m-a | Hacker News Reader

I'm an Iranian living in Italy and have an Italian phone/WhatsApp number. Couldn't call anyone or receive WhatsApp calls to/from Iranian and non-Iranian numbers yesterday afternoon when the internet blocking started in Iran. It was like all numbers somehow in touch with Iranian contacts were blocked from completing calls. As soon as either side of the call would answer, the call would end with a message like you are connected via a network that has blocked WhatsApp or something similar.

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How is it possible for two non-Iranians (in a geographic/telecom sense, not ethnic sense) to lose the connection on WhatsApp due to Iranian government? Surely the blocklist isn't implemented inside Facebook, it must be based on cellphone carrier.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32937782 links to claims that the Iranian government hacked WhatsApp or one of its networking providers.

Normally the government (in this case Iran) contacts the service provider (in this case FB/Whatsapp)and lets them know that unless they self-block their service, the government will do blocking at the network level and might issue fines.

Normally, that makes the service provider implement blocks on their end, because then at least they can present the user with a sensible error message, and other services that the government isn't trying to block are not impacted (eg. services hosted on the same servers - for example Whatsapp voice calls might be banned, but text chat not banned).

Sure, but if Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp would react to such an order from _Iran_ they'd be in very big trouble _very_ quickly. That's violating US sanctions level stuff.

Ignoring the Iranian government might make them loose some users. Trying to ignore the US government will make some people go to prison. If that's what happens.. someone made a _very_ bad decision

It is illegal in USA for Meta to pay fines to Iran government.

The government is blocking at network level anyway.

The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI, not proactively block users who aren't using the affected network at all.

> The app provider should detect the network outage and provide a good UI,

Can the blocking be adequately distinguished from packet loss? If not it seems like it would be embarrassing for the app to declare Government blockage when it's not really the case.

It’s probably validated by a human before the message is deployed.

To my knowledge, Iranian government doesn't have power to dictate FB's actions outside Iran. So FB could block by the IPs, but blocking everywhere by the nationality makes no sense (at least by the standards of a normal person).

I can only send email 500 miles and my nationality seems to impact my cell service

Github once managed to ban accounts of Iranians, even students in the US. Afaik shortly after that GH went to the US government and convinced them that sanctioning every Iranian even outside Iran was technically and politically dubious, which resulted in the sanctions being relaxed in some way.

There is zero chance that FB/Meta is complicit in this. The occam's razor answer is that the Iranian government has figured out an attack, and a bunch of FB employees are frantically trying to mitigate it instead of reading HN.

I doubt Iran needs to go to the extent of hacking Meta to block a few random users in Italy? They've achieved their main aim of quelling protests by simply blocking at the network level. I'm skeptical about the original bug report.

There are tons of Iranians abroad, figuring out a way to cut them off from the local population is definitely a worthy goal for the regime.

> blocking at the network level

How could any network-level block by Iran prevent a user in the UK from calling a user in India?

Facebook is working with the Iranian government, of course.

I noticed this issue last night while trying to call WhatsApp numbers in India from the UK (no Iranian numbers involved). I got the same error message: "Couldn't place call because your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network that prevents WhatsApp calls. Connect to a different network or turn Wi-Fi off." I wonder if that was collateral damage from the Iranian block.

I have friends here in the US who use WhatsApp and they are originally from Iran. I wonder, if it's been many years since they lived in Iran if they're still considered "Iranian" for the purposes of this blockage?

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