How Iran’s regime has hidden its brutal crackdown

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. IRANIANS ARE accustomed to losing access to phone and internet services during unrest. The internet was cut off during protests in 2019 and during another big wave of demonstrations in 2022.

But the current blackout is worse than anything experienced before. On January 8th internet connectivity fell to 1% of its normal levels, where it has remained. That has left Iranians struggling to communicate with each other and to get news of the uprising, and the increasingly bloody crackdown, to the outside world.

There is some indication that the protests may have slowed down by January 12th, when the regime held large counter-demonstrations. Protesters may have been deterred by the violence of the preceding days, when at least 500 and possibly more than 1,000 people are thought to have been killed by security forces. Rather than covering up the massacres, state television broadcast images of victims’ bodies and acknowledged that many had been “ordinary people" rather than armed saboteurs, as the government claims.

“We are not looking for war, but we are prepared for war," declared Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, speaking in Tehran on January 12th. The situation was under “total control", he insisted, implausibly, and suggested that internet access would soon be restored. It is hard to make a definitive judgment about the situation on the ground because Iran successfully clamped down on information flowing out of the country.

Iran’s regime is well practised at severing its digital links with the outside world. It does so in several ways. One is to manipulate something called the Border Gateway Protocol, which determines how the global internet connects to the Iranian one.