Tehran says it shut the internet for a few hours. The traffic records say nearly a hundred days
Iran’s top cyberspace official told the public the country has had one brief shutdown. A fact-checking outlet and Cloudflare’s own traffic data put two nationwide blackouts in 2026 totalling close to three months.
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.” The Iranian fact-checking outlet Factnameh rated the claim false on 16 October, counting two prolonged nationwide shutdowns this year — 8 to 17 January, during the protests, and 28 February to 26 May, after the war with the United States and Israel began — amounting to nearly 100 days offline. Factnameh cross-referenced the dates against Cloudflare Radar, which logs two government-directed shutdowns in the same windows with traffic falling to near zero. In May, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani had framed it differently: “The people’s demand for the internet is legitimate, but since we are at war, the relevant bodies must weigh in and decide when it will be reconnected.”
Assessment: The interesting move is not denial but reclassification: “restriction” rather than “shutdown” is a category that lets a state concede the throttling while disowning the blackout, and it is designed for a domestic audience that lived through both. Two things circulating around this should be held at arm’s length. Reports of fresh provincial connectivity drops on 16 October rest on a single aggregator citing an unnamed monitoring platform. And the line attributed to an unnamed IRGC spokesperson about seven subsea cables under Hormuz has reached English readers through UK aggregators, with no Persian original, no wire pickup and a near-identical theme already covered in May. Neither is confirmed.