For the past four days, amid unprecedented protests that have set Iran’s streets ablaze, the Iranian regime has almost completely cut off internet access across the country.

In June, shortly after the Israeli army attacked Iran, the authorities had also taken similar measures. How did the Iranian authorities manage to disconnect the country from the global internet?

Two internet network specialists, Frédérick Douzet, a professor at the French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG), and Kavé Salamatian, a professor at the Savoie-Mont-Blanc University, answered Le Monde‘s questions on the matter in June 2025, in this republished interview.

Is the scale of the shutdown unprecedented?

Frédérick Douzet: Iran had already implemented a shutdown of this scale in November 2019, to suppress protests against rising fuel prices. The goal was to censor information and control the population. However, this is the first time that Iran has enacted such a large-scale shutdown for national security reasons, as a means of defending itself against an attack.

Does this shutdown completely disconnect Iran from the outside world, or the outside world from Iran, or both?

F. D.: The shutdown isolates the Iranian internet from the global internet, cutting off traffic between the national network and the outside world, in both directions. The goal is to prevent any coordination with external actors. However, the Iranian national network continues to operate in isolation.

The shutdown is nevertheless not entirely airtight, as we have observed a small amount of traffic that still flows between the internal network and the global internet. It is highly likely that state and strategic actors still have internet access. This is the result of years of groundwork to achieve fine-grained control over traffic, enabling the authorities to decide who can access the internet and who cannot, down to a neighborhood or even, at times, a single city block. In this way, the regime can disconnect internet users while ensuring that traffic that is essential for the economy to function, such as banking operations, continues to circulate.

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