Iran has been forced to shut down the Internet for more than 1,000 hours. Possession of Starlink terminals can lead to the death penalty.

According to NetBlocks, a global network connectivity monitoring organization,Iran's nationwide mandatory Internet shutdown has exceeded 1,000 hours, making it the second longest nationwide network shutdown in recorded history in the world.The network outage was fully escalated on February 28, the day the United States and Israel launched a joint military strike against Iran. After the network disconnection was initiated, the internal network traffic remained at about 1% of the normal level before the network disconnection. CloudflareRadar monitoring data displayAt about 7:00 UTC on February 28, HTTP traffic in Iran instantly plummeted by 98%. Byte transmission volume, HTTP bytes, and the number of network requests dropped at the same time. Many core provinces such as Tehran, Fars, and Isfahan were simultaneously paralyzed by the network.

During the outage, Iran only retained a small amount of network and DNS traffic to be transmitted through specific IPv4 links. Cloudflare confirmed that Iran has activated a whitelist mechanism to reserve network access for only a small number of approved users and local services. Iranian official media also stated that domestic network access can only be transferred through the local intranet "National Information Network", and only pre-approved websites can be accessed normally.

In order to block overseas network access channels, Iran has passed special legislation this year. It is reported that,Possessing or operating Starlink terminals in Iran is punishable by up to the death penalty, and the authorities are actively searching for relevant holders. In January this year, a researcher revealed in an interview with IranWire thatIran has used military-grade jamming technology to block Starlink signals, making Starlink unable to become a network solution for local people. In addition, Iran has publicly threatened to attack the infrastructure of global technology giants such as OpenAI, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

NetBlocks statistics show that the duration of this outage has exceeded all similar incidents recorded by the agency. Only the six-month nationwide outage in Libya during the Arab Spring was longer. Iran had previously implemented Internet restrictions due to domestic protests in January this year. Iran's Minister of Communications admitted that the network outages at that time caused an average daily economic loss of 35.7 million U.S. dollars, and online sales fell by up to 80%.

On April 10, Amnesty International publicly called on the Iranian authorities to restore Internet access.