Iranian authorities appeared to be cutting off internet access Thursday in the capital and some other regions of the country as mass protests and chanting against the government continue. Two sources in Tehran told CBS News the internet was down in the capital.
The NetBlocks monitoring organization said Thursday, at about 8 p.m. local time, that its live data “show #Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout, as internet connectivity falls on multiple providers; the new incident follows regional shutdowns, and is likely to severely limit coverage of events on the ground as protests spread.”
A CBS News source in the capital said there were “huge crowds out across Tehran. Unprecedented.”
They also said the internet was down for most people in the city, but a select few with more robust, more reliable business accounts could still get online.
The web outage came as Iranians began chanting out of their windows against the regime, following a call by exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former U.S.-backed shah, to make their voices heard. Analysts and insiders told CBS News the scale of the response to Pahalvi’s call could determine whether the deadly, 12-day-old protests fizzle out as previous rounds of unrest have, or grow into a major challenge to the government, and provoke a possible wider crackdown.
So far the unrest has left at least 39 people dead, including four members of the security services, and seen more than 2,260 others detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
NetBlocks said earlier that its “data show the loss of connectivity on #Iran internet backbone provider TCI in the restive city of Kermanshah as protests spread across the nation in their 12th day; the incident comes amid rising casualties with indications of disruptions in multiple regions.”
Iranian authorities regularly restrict or disable internet access when they expect significant protests or other potentially destabilizing events.
President Mahsoud Pezeshkian, seen as a reformer but subordinate to Iran’s longtime Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intimated ahead of his election in 2024 that he would free up the internet and make more websites accessible. It remains tightly restricted, however. Social media sites such as TikTok, Facebook and X are officially banned, as is access to U.S. and European news sites, including CBS News.
Many young, tech-savvy Iranians have become adept at getting around the restrictions, but it’s a cumbersome process, and when the regime slows down internet speeds at politically sensitive times, the whole system can become unusable.
