Tehran, Iran – Iran’s state-imposed near-total internet shutdown is now the longest nationwide blackout on record in any country, according to a global monitor.Connectivity to the global internet has been at around one percent of pre-war levels since shortly after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28, according to NetBlocks.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAnother 20-day internet shutdown was imposed in January, when thousands were killed during nationwide protests, meaning that most Iranian civilians have now spent close to two-thirds of 2026 in digital darkness – with only a limited and at times slow intranet serving to offer some basic services and allow access to state-run news and messaging services.“Iran is the first country to have had internet connectivity and then subsequently lost it by reverting to a national network,” NetBlocks said on Sunday.It added that while Myanmar, Sudan, Kashmir and Tigray have had incidents of longer intermittent blackouts, none has experienced a state-imposed shutdown at this scale for this long.No wars, including those in Ukraine and Gaza, have been known to “have sent an entire country offline” like Iran, the monitor said.During the January shutdown, the government said that many online businesses could not survive more than three weeks of being disconnected, and that the beleaguered economy was haemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars in direct damages each day, not to mention the untold indirect and cumulative effects of a nationwide blackout.More than five weeks into the war, the government has not explained how it expects the remnants of the country’s battered digital sector and its …
