Tehran’s cyberspace secretary says Iran went offline once for hours; the measurements say 100 days

Mohammad Amin Aghamiri, secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, said on 13 October: “We had a complete internet shutdown only once last year; the rest was all restriction. We fully shut it down for just a few hours in January so our security colleagues could manage the situation.” On 16 October the Persian-language fact-checking outlet Factnameh ruled the claim false. It counts two prolonged nationwide shutdowns in 2026 — one in January during nationwide protests, and one beginning 28 February after the war with the United States and Israel started and running to 26 May — totalling close to 100 days offline, and says Cloudflare Radar logs both as government-directed, with traffic falling to near zero. The exact January dates are contested between trackers; the February–May event is not.

The second shutdown is the one with independent measurement attached. VOA, reporting on 13 October, cites NetBlocks putting its duration at 88 days and more than 2,000 hours, with Iranian connectivity at roughly one percent of pre-war levels, and NetBlocks characterising it as the longest recorded nationwide blackout anywhere. The same report notes the government has acknowledged daily direct economic losses in the tens of millions of dollars, and that the restoration order went through a headquarters chaired by First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref. Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani, at her weekly press conference, said only that “certain government agencies are occasionally compelled to reduce internet connectivity speed,” attributing the current slowdown to wartime conditions. Lifting internet restrictions was a Pezeshkian campaign promise.

The enforcement side is moving in the other direction. Al Jazeera reported on 14 October that Iranian authorities are using patrols and drone searches to intercept Starlink terminals and raiding retailers, and that the Foreign Ministry summoned Norway’s ambassador in Tehran on 4 October over what it called a failure to act on unauthorised Starlink operations. Deputy Technology Minister Mohammad Hafez Hakami told a governance meeting in late September that Starlink, if it became prevalent, could be “the last nail in the coffin of the [cyberspace] governance” of Iran. The escalation ladder is a decade old: Telegram blocked after the 2017–18 protests, the first week-long national shutdown in 2019, WhatsApp and Instagram blocked after 2022–23, near-total shutdown in January 2026.

Assessment: Aghamiri’s formulation is more interesting than its falsity. He is not denying that Iranians were offline for months; he is reclassifying it — a “restriction” rather than a “shutdown” — which is a bid to keep the word blackout attached only to the few hours the state is willing to own. That matters because the Pezeshkian administration campaigned on lifting restrictions and now has to reconcile that with a measured 88-day outage. Watch for the vocabulary to migrate: throttling, bandwidth management, security-driven speed reduction. Note too that the regional pattern is no longer exceptional. A secondary tracker reading Cloudflare Radar counts 18 government-directed Iraqi shutdowns in Q3 2026 alone, all for exams, all exempting the Kurdistan region — routine, administrative, unprotested.