The Iranian regime’s internet shutdown, initiated on Jan. 8, 2026, has severely diminished the flow of information out of the country. Without internet access, little news about the national protests that flared between Dec. 30, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, and the regime’s violent crackdown has reached the world. Many digital rights and internet monitoring groups have assessed the current shutdown to be the most sophisticated and most severe in Iran’s history.
We are a social scientist and two computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Intelligence Lab who study internet connectivity.
Through the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, we have been measuring internet connectivity globally since 2011. The project was motivated by the internet shutdowns during the Arab Spring mass protests that began in December 2010 against Middle Eastern and North African regimes.
The project provides a public dashboard of internet connectivity measurements. Its long view of global internet connectivity offers insight into the Iranian regime’s developing sophistication in controlling information and shutting down the internet in the country.
Our measurements show that Iran has been in a complete internet shutdown since Jan. 8. This is longer than the 48½-hour shutdown in June 2025 during the Israel-Iran war and surpasses the duration of the November 2019 shutdown that lasted almost seven days. Compared to the two weeks of nightly mobile phone network shutdowns in September to October of 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests, this shutdown is more complete by also closing down fixed-line connectivity.
Measuring internet connectivity
The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project measures global internet connectivity through three signals related to internet infrastructure: routing announcements, active probing and internet background noise.
Core routers, unlike the router in your home, are responsible for directing traffic to and from networks. Routing announcements are how they communicate with each other. If a nation’s network of routers stop making these announcements, the network will disappear from the global internet.
We also measure the responsiveness of networks through probing. To create the probing signal, we continuously ping devices in millions of networks around the globe. Most devices are designed to automatically respond to these pings by echoing them back to the sender. We collect these responses and label networks as “connected/active.”
A tool we use dubbed “network telescope” captures internet background noise – traffic generated by hundreds of thousands of internet hosts worldwide. A drop in this signal can indicate an outage.
A history of shutdowns
The first nationwide shutdown that the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project observed in Iran was during the “Bloody November” uprising that happened in 2019. During that shutdown, the primary…
