Internet outage in Iran reaches 1,008 hours
mastodon.social
mastodon.social
I still believe the Iranian government is more afraid of it's people than of the US and Israel - the US and Israel can bomb leadership and materiel, but without ground troops, regime capitulation is unlikely, unless the populace can themselves overthrow the govt (though that is hard to do when there is a major imbalance in who has guns).
Iranians broadly hate their government, yeah. But the thing that gets them rioting is economic failure. Which the strikes have exacerbated.
Social media is swarmed by people saying it’ll be like Iraq and Iranians will hate the US for its actions. I’m not convinced. My small anecdata of Iranian friends with contacts in Iran agrees with me.
I think we could see regime change within a decade.
The workers already have seized the means of production. I mean truly. Owner does not have the keys. Some manager unlocks the building for the day. Workers show up to the farm. Everything gets done every day whether the owner is there or across the globe or some dubious llc entity. The only thing the owner functionally does, is to be an address on file to send their cut of the profits. Nothing more than a specially designated furnace to burn a subset of the monthly revenue, at least in terms of their actual interaction with their business and their businesses interaction with themselves.
Socialism is as easy as people waking up, going to work as usual, and not mailing that check to the owner. And having the owner go to the police, who in turn tell them "Awe shucks." These are the only conditions for socialism in 2026. Same as they were in 1926. So tantalizingly possible if people were just on board with it and not beholden to capitalism. Propaganda is why there are a subset of workers who will continue to diligently burn revenue for the owner, and why police will ultimately make the choice to sacrifice their own lives for the petty profits of this ownership class versus consider their own position in this world.
We saw this with Occupy Wall Street and the CHAZ in the U.S - these protests didn't fail because they were crushed, they failed because local police basically let them win and then once they won different factions had different ideas of what to do next. We also see it at the state level with the Soviet Union (where a strong dictatorship did eventually emerge - the communist revolution didn't mean everybody was equal, it just meant some people were more equal than others) and in Vietnam (which became intensely capitalist less than 15 years after the communists won.
The function of the business owner, CEO, or other executive figure is simply to be a symbol of which direction the organization needs to go. They don't do any work themselves, and they are selected for their ability to look pretty and shout platitudes that other people follow. But that symbol is needed to actually get the people moving in one direction.
And then what is you do what you would have done at work yesterday, today. Same job description as you had previously. Your manager? Same as they were yesterday too. Everything exactly the same. Just some guy you never see is not getting their passive income. No machinery would sit idle for the same reason no machinery sat idle yesterday: people showed up to run it.
This is sort of how it worked in Cuba. Factories were nationalized and people went from working for the man to working for the public. And then the man had no government that would listen to them either. They had to go to the US government, argue that this was some great taking if left unanswered would sure happen all over the US and the rest of the world, and a hasty invasion designed by the US for these business owners to feign any political responsibility was designed, executed, and pushed back on the beachhead by the Cubans. Today the nation of Cuba remains sanctioned because of these owners from decades ago and their descendants, who still represent a significant political influence in south florida congressional districts, still feel like they were robbed by the people they were exploiting.
I don't disagree, mind you. You probably could just keep the supply chains moving indefinitely while substituting actual trust for the pseudo-trust and obligation Capital's funds are supposed to engender. It would just be interesting to see the first steps.
On the one hand I see that money is some forcing factor to prevent everyone from living to some degree of excess. But on the other hand, if there were no money, it isn't like resources come out of the ether to meet demands for excess. I expect it would end up like the lifestyle we see in rural villages, where no one really lives much in excess of eachother, the community is basically sized to the limits of what the resources they manage to bring in can support. There might be different roles in the community but it isn't like one person's day's labor is worth significantly more than another person's in a different occupation like it is in our western society, where we might value someones day of effort the same as the days effort of a thousand people, simply because of their title, not because they have the strength of a thousand people.
In terms of how this might look across the globe, probably everyone moving towards median standard of living whatever it happens to be in that region. No hoarders of wealth any longer. Might be very scary for someone like Bezos, but for most of us probably the exact same standard of living that we already know. Probably better without all the waste going towards filling these unproductive hoards of resources.
If.
It's blood against blood, but it's quite rare for people to rise up while there's an external enemy. Russia 1917 is the only example I can think of?
Yes, actually I do. Are you aware how long the process of transformation was and how little actual violence did the royal troops mete out? Most of the blood during the French Revolution was shed among the revolutionaries themselves, later. Not by the old regime which barely resisted what was happening, being confused more than anything else.
The French monarchy was remarkably limp-wristed in its reaction to the post-1789 developments, probably because, in the beginning, not even the revolutionaries themselves expected to actually dismantle the monarchy. There was no civil war similar to Cromwell's England, nor massacres in the streets similar to modern Iran. In the largest event of that early period which could be called "a battle" (Storming of the Bastille), a grand total of 114 royalist soldiers made their last stand. Which is tiny for a country the size of France.
It took about a year for the situation to progress from the first session of the Estates General to the royal family attempted flight from Versailles, and 2,5 more years for the King to be executed. A classical case of the frog being boiled very slowly. The royal regime was indecisive and offered close to zero violent resistence.
(If you want to learn about an actual abortive French revolution which was suppressed with actual brutal violence by the royalists, look up Fronda of 1648-1653.)
In contrast, current rulers of Iran have 0 doubts about what is going to happen to them - and within minutes - if they get caught by the street crowd that hates them.
The provisional government was center-left, the army was mostly controlled by the right, and the workers' councils leaned towards revolutionary left. The right wanted to use the army to arrest Bolshevik leaders. The government declined, fearing a military coup. The right saw the government siding with the left and made an actual coup attempt. The government had to rely on the workers' councils to stop it. Which then emboldened the Bolsheviks to stage a revolution of their own a bit later.
But because the right was definitely not on board this time, the second revolution was only partially successful. Instead of a controlled regime change, the Bolsheviks got a civil war that lasted five years and killed millions.
I believe Iranians want to be able to decide their own fate, with the dignity that all humans deserve. Without criminal domestic religious zealots and without foreign meddling and bombing.
The previous protest was followed by the killing of Mahsa Amini, in morality police’s custody because of improper hijab. It’s not only economic hardships. But you’re right that war has made the situation worse, obviously.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/iran-at-least...
They certainly do, the domestic religious zealots/terrorists on the other hand murdered over 30,000 protesters in 2 days to stop that from happening.
> Without criminal domestic religious zealots and without foreign meddling and bombing.
The domestic religious zealots have essentially ensured that foreign military intervention is required to some degree for Iranians to have the ability to decide their own fate. At this point it's likely most Iranians support some form of foreign intervention.
I am having a very hard time believing anyone would be favourable to the country currently lobbing bombs at them from halfway around the globe. Regardless of how much they dislike their current regime.
Maybe this fuels some "everyone loves America, the good guys" fantasy, but, as someone who's come from a country where the people did not like the regime, I am very skeptical foreign interference will be seen positively or even neutrally.
Or maybe this is an attempt at making the war seem somehow just and led on humanitarian and democratic principles, as opposed to what it actually is.
For reference, it has been verfied [~] that the regime killed ~220 students just in the recent uprisings of this January. That's a whole school full of students, all under-18. And then you have to ask, why would a teenager be on the streets, given that they knew, everyone knew, that snipers and machine guns will be there? Just 5 days ago they hung an 18-year-old who was arrested this Jan. They also hung a 19-yo wrestling champion very recently. The collateral damage of these bombings, which must be denounced and is reprehensible, still has not reached these levels either in brutality and in number. [1]
[~] (my internet connection is not good enough to find the sources, I'm using dnstt in a very unreliable network)
[1] AFAIK, Around 180-190 students have died in the recent conflict. Some 160-170 was due to an erroneous airstrike by the US military on the first day of the war, and their school was within 30 meters of a military base (!). Furthermore, some of the other students who have died were the children of the assassinated regime officials.
Sorry to hear that. Are you currently in Iran now? Or have contact with people in Iran?
Tel Aviv perhaps? Wartime is the worst time to stage a revolutionary for anyone,specifically because its a induces a state of emergency, and any activities can be construed as aiding the enemy.
If you need a hint, just take a look at what this regime did in Syria (600k dead and 12 years of internal war), in Gaza and Palestine (75k dead), in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and more. Most recently, this January in Iran with 40k dead. You see mullahs' footprints everywhere there is a humanitarian disaster, and I'm not optimistic about the future of Iran, in either case. These are not the kind of people that let go easily, they have a cataclysmic view of the world. They (literally) gave a "Passport to Heaven" to their fighters (Assad supporters) in Syria, and those very same fighters are chanting pro-regime songs (if you can even call it that) every night at every square and major street in the city.
As an Iranian, we saw these [death] figures as an abstract concept prior to these recent events. We (the ordinary citizens) heard about Yemen and the massacre in Syria, we "sympathized," and that was it. It wasn't until this January that it finally hit me, that 40k people dying is like 15 Tienanmen squares happening at once, or 5 times the D-Day battles casualties. And it's chilling to think about what the future will look like, knowing that this is only the beginning and we are choosing between "terrible" and "much worse."
1) they HATE their government more than anything in the world. They’ve seen the government killing its own people.
2) the consensus of civilians is that strikes by and large are hitting IRGC targets. They do not feel civilian targets are being targeted even though the nature of it has resulted in civilian deaths.
3) they don’t feel inclined to give trump the slightest amount of trust or good will. They just want regime change by any means.
Past riots were related to women rights or election fraud. The last one were related to the economic situation, but there is a large young population in Iran which aren't religious anymore, and living in an oppressive theocracy
https://gtnm.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-theocratic-authorita...
Didn't help anybody in Minab.
Now, they're probably good to go for a couple more decades. Trump is precisely the kind of threat Iranians have been warned about since the revolution. When a regime spends almost half a century preparing for something and it finally happens, it earns them considerable forgiveness. Also, nothing unites people quite like a foreign threat, especially one dumb enough to bomb schoolgirls in its opening salvo.
By scuttling the JCPOA for no apparent reason and now invading Iran right when it appeared the regime was crumbling, Trump has single-handedly reinvigorated Iran's theocracy and given them the public support they need for the final push towards nuclear weapons. That's what's so sickening about this invasion. It has acted in diametric opposition to the the policy goals it was purportedly pursuing.
Essentially, they’ve created a two-tier system controlling who can access the internet.
Erm, dude, you did look at the graph on the Mastodon post linked to, right ?
You see that bit where it falls off a cliff to 0% netblocks ?
"white SIM card" or not, you're not getting internet if there's no BGP routes being announced.
The only way around 0 BGP announcements would be satellite...
I suspect your "white SIM card" was a pre-war status-quo ...
Not sure if we're all looking at the same plot, but I see things hovering above zero, not exactly at zero.
It is hard to spin that in a positive light. It looks a little unreasonable. Even without a propaganda effort by the Iranians there is a great scratching of heads in the west trying to figure out why we're embarking on this crazy crusade.
Although I hear the IRGC's lego game is on point so that is interesting.
If we wanted to worry about nuclear proliferation, negotiation was the path to take. There was a JCPOA and it seems like Khamenei Sr turned out to be serious about Iran not developing nukes in his lifetime. They've been a year or two away for more than a decade as I recall. Senseless violence isn't going to do anything to encourage disarmament - that is another part of why the Iranians have such an easy battle ahead of them in terms of propaganda.
If we're going to worry about Iran getting nukes, assassinating the anti-nuke guy and pummelling them as Trump is will not help the situation in the slightest. The only path where they survive as a state is the one where they build nuclear missiles.
Have a read: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603102323 https://www.iranintl.com/en/202602031576
https://web.archive.org/web/20260116190959/https://www.thegu...
That propaganda can also be spread by people who do not have "white simcards" simply by virtue of the fact they live outside Iran.
This includes, for example, the various posts made by Iranian embassies around the world.
Come on, this is a technical forum, I really shouldn't need to spell that out !
As I said, satellite is a thing.
I also don't doubt there may be some traditional land-based BGP access going on too, maybe using "borrowed" prefixes. But I do not think it is as much as people think it might be.
I also doubt there are 50,000 "white SIM" active today... I suspect that Wikipedia "unofficial figure" reflects pre-war. Most have very likely been disconnected or blocked.
They say things like "no matter what it takes, no matter how many of us die, we must be free again, this time we will win against the terrorist regime" (paraphrased).
Your paraphased quote also implies that there must be actual regime change for the deaths to be worth it (ie, no IRGC).
They drank the kool aid entirely, 50+ years ago and the government has been coasting on that American moral superiority ever since.
Of course, that only brings us to, "It's easy to claim others are offering their lives for your goals."
I guess it's probably best to just realize everything you see on the subject of any given war is probably propaganda. And judge the value of it through that lens.
The regime will kill you/your loved ones and brand them as criminals if you protest against them or break an unreasonable law, the US and Israel will kill you and brand you as terrorists because you happened to be Iranian and in the wrong place.
I think people outside of Iran/Iranians vastly underestimate the disdain for the Iranian regime. Go watch the movie "It was just an accident" to get a basic feel for how much they hate the regime, then amplify that tenfold.
I once attended a military "fair"(?) where they'd show off their equipment and had some anti-US "games", eg one involving throwing a shoe at a target with Obama or maybe Bush's face printed on it, and observed people enthusiastically taking part in it.
My impression was that while people hated and feared the regime, they still broadly shared the anti-foreign intervention stance, particularly against the US. I'm having a hard time believing that they'd still be pro-US after Trump threatened genocide against them.
Your viewpoint is comes from a different place than that of natives or diaspora
Iranian here.. no, we're not celebrating US bombing our children. People are very united right now, the war is for the survival of IRAN. Our plight with IRGC is set aside to defeat the invaders attempting to take our home land.
I'm not sure how you can both claim "you support the bombing of your family in Tehran" but also claim "the campaign needs to end".
For reference, my own cousin was taken to Evin prison for 6 months after the Mahsa uprising and after she was released, she had to be hospitalized for a year. She will never leave a normal life again. So I have NO LOVE for IRGC.
But no, I am not going to "cheer" for US and Israel for bombing Isfahan, Shiraz and destroy our Shah Cheragh.
We have 90M people in our home and we can figure things out among ourselves, just like have done so since the dawn of the Achaemenids.
P.S I hope your family is safe.
Meanwhile Iran is collapsing from just the water shortage alone. The idea that the US is the cause of Iran struggling for survival requires a pretty distorted world view.
one of the main peace demands the US has is to put boots on the ground to steal iran's uranium
That seems a little bit suspect, how many Iranians do you know? I have difficulty believing that less than around 20-30% of them support the regime. There seems to be a baseline of around that fraction of people who support the status quo.
It isn't so hard to find people who support full-on communism. Any reasonable sample should be turning up a lot of really weird opinions.
With that being said I don’t like/want the war. I understand and sympathize with the emotional response from my compatriots because they see the oppressors are getting the bloody beating they well deserve. But I don’t really think that the current war brings anything good for the people. I wish it did but it doesn’t look like it. I wish the regime would fall but they haven’t and we now have ~2000 more innocents dead on top of thousands that government killed in January.
How in your mind do we get to the regime answering for its crimes? What is going to dislodge them? If they are not dislodged and continue to indoctrinate more people where does this go? If they have more weapons where does it go?
Is any chance that some elements within the current regime will change sides? What percent of soldiers or militia are die hard fanatics vs. people who will jump ship if there's a good chance of that "ship" sinking?
Clearly your sample of Iranians is very biased.
I am not pro theocratic regimes, but not only does the US/Israel _not_ have the right to wage this war, but this war will only make the regime stronger.
Nothing more unifying than getting bombed, especially in martyrdom cultures.
They know leaving the internet online would be beneficial for their adversaries, perhaps especially as Israel is one of them, and Israel's use of cyber is no secret.
So by killing the internet, they have an instant air-gap firewall.
Making the most of the levers they have fighting asymmetric warfare.
I mean, sure. But then being at war is also economically harmful. :)
I am not seeking to frame anything here. Nor am I interested in getting involved in the broader areas on discussion on the subject.
The first few words of my original post made it clear "Looking at it from an alternative angle". An alternative way of wording that would be "devil's advocate".
I am just supplying a perfectly reasonable alternative perspective, I am not asking anyone to agree or disagree with it, I am just making a "food for thought" statement.
I see it, and hadn't fully considered it. Turning off the Internet has more utility than just suppressing the populaces ability to communicate, it also blackholes that compromised mail server used to track the movement of political leaders, any online drop-boxes/Telegram/Whatsapp channels used by cultivated informants/spies are now out of order.
We know from the Ukraine side that "keeping the internet on" requires a whole bunch of personal sacrifice, and a lot of "reasonably recent" electronic equipment and infrastructure that Iran can't simply buy or repair right now.
Perhaps you are underestimating the resources available to a country of 90 million. You could play a game where you estimate the number of routers and switches outside of Tehran under a hypothetical where the the capital was leveled. I don't know how many universities Iran has, but my working assumption is that any one Computer Science department from a D-Tier university is equal to the task, if the physical carrier medium for the Internet is still present and they are bringing their ancient half-rack of equipment.
Their country is very much on the edge of chaos which is why they are brutally controlling their citizens.
Especially being at war with practically all the countries around you.
Sure, but why make their life easier ?
Taking your line of argument, you would also need to say "well, the US are going to bomb us anyway. We might as well just post all the GPS coordinates of sensitive sites up on Twitter".
It doesn't matter what your constitution says, western countries have readily adopted brutal censorship during serious wars virtually every time.
Failing to do so simply allows hostile foreign powers free reign in the information space domestically and increases the chance you lose
Of course information does still get in and out, but that is severely throttled
Iran has been rolling out the National Information Network (essentially a whitelisted internet) since the Green Revolution [0] back in 2009-12. Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [8], and China [8].
Iran also uses a two-tier SIM card system - ideologically vetted individuals get a "white" SIM which gives full ingress/egress outside the NIN and others have a normal SIM that can be blacklisted from egressing outside the NIN.
Notice how Iranian websites have a page saying "Transferring to Website" - that's the gateway page for the NIN.
[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/
[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa
[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...
[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...
[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545
[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...
[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/
[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home
[8] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...
The issue is, if you control the Network DMZ, it's extremely difficult to bypass. In Xinjiang and Tibet (which has a similar setup) they used to use smuggled Kazakh, Nepali, and Indian SIM cards but that was cracked down.
A lot of the info from inside Iran that is not regime connected is coming from areas in Iranian Kurdistan where an Iraqi SIM could be smuggled or accessed somewhat easier than other areas.
Mind you that organization has been severely degraded, but that only scares civilians even more as functionaries are much more trigger happy (rape [0], summary execution [1], torture [2] are already the norm).
That makes covert P2P much harder.
[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/iran-security...
[1] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit...
[2] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/0673/2026/en/
Bitcoin and Crypto as a shadow financial system was enabled by Qatar and the UAE where there are dedicated deal desks that work on ExAmerica trades.
This is why the IRGC striking Qatar and the UAE was such a bad move. Even companies in the PRC try to follow American sanctions regimes because trade with Japan+SK+ASEAN is higher priority than trade with Russia or Iran.
Not all dual use institutions are directly attacked - it reduces negotiating power.
Negotiations are based on defection and exploiting misaligned incentives.
Not sure what else I can say so I shall not answer other questions.
predictable down vote
but listen up, Iran has made a tactical move in this, but the implication is that they, like Afganistan are consideriing a strategic move, and many others are watching.
more down voting, which is an excellent demonstration of how the internet is used by those that "own" it
- "You are wrong! Everyone is not crazy"
- "You see? I told you. Everyone is crazy"