Iran’s Internet After the Protests: What Two Months of Data Shows
When mass demonstrations broke out in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, the government’s instinct was to clamp down on the networks that helped spread the news. But two months on, the traffic data tells a more complicated story—one of temporary restrictions followed by a lasting surge in Internet use.
The protests didn’t just play out on the streets. They were organized and documented on platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, which are estimated to be used by over half of the Iranian population. In response, authorities moved quickly to restrict access to those services, and for stretches of the first week, cut off large portions of the country from the open Internet entirely.
That initial shutdown, however, did not hold. And from the perspective of Cloudflare’s network, what followed was a sustained increase in traffic from Iranian providers that has remained well above pre-protest levels.
A History of Building a Walled Garden
Iran’s attempt to control its national Internet is not new. In the early 2000s, under conservative President Ahmadinejad, officials began floating the idea of a domestically controlled “Iranian Internet” that would operate independently from the global network. The plan was to make the country’s digital infrastructure self-sufficient while remaining compliant with government policy.
The idea gained real momentum in 2009, when mass protests over the disputed presidential election highlighted how powerful the open Internet could be as an organizing tool. Around that time, the government began requiring ISPs to obtain approval to operate, with content filtering as a condition of that approval.
By 2013, work had begun on a National Infrastructure Network (NIN), designed to recreate essential services—search, messaging, and more—inside the country. Local services were subsidized and encouraged, which made them easier to monitor and filter. This was not the total ban seen in China, but a deliberate shift in that direction. Given Iran’s relatively small number of physical connections to the outside world, the government also kept open the option of severing international traffic while leaving domestic services like banking online—a tactic it used during the November 2019 fuel price protests.
Initial Response: Shutdowns and Curfews
Four major network providers account for roughly 85% of Internet traffic in Iran—three mobile operators and one fixed-line provider. Using the week before the protests as a baseline, the patterns of usage were fairly steady, though the mobile networks showed predictable daily peaks and troughs.
That normal rhythm changed on September 16, when the protests began. Traffic data shows a dramatic drop across providers, effectively a coordinated shutdown lasting most of a day. In the days that followed, usage appeared to return toward a somewhat normal pattern—but that was short-lived.
Over the next week, a more striking pattern emerged. As the unrest spread, overall traffic surged well above the baseline, even as mobile operators introduced what looked like nightly curfews. The three mobile providers saw traffic fall to near zero overnight, while the fixed-line provider did not.
Two Months Later: More Traffic, Fewer Curfews
By mid-November, the picture had changed again. Two things stand out in the data from a recent week. First, overall activity across Iran’s major providers remains markedly higher than before the protests began. Second, the overnight curfews appear to have been lifted—traffic still declines at night, but it no longer “flatlines” the way it did in the weeks immediately following the unrest.
Why Iran Couldn’t Stay Offline
Despite roughly a decade of work on its national Internet and a clear willingness to restrict access when threatened, Iran has not fully cut itself off from the global network. The likely reason is economic and practical: the Internet has become too embedded in everyday life and commerce for a total shutdown to remain sustainable.
Even with the NIN in place, the data from major Iranian providers shows that international traffic through Cloudflare increased substantially during the protests. Certain platforms—WhatsApp among them—remain blocked without a VPN. But the broader pattern is telling. The notion that a government can pull the plug into a self-contained “splinternet” is being tested, and so far, in Iran’s case, it has not held.
