Tehran’s networks faltered hours before anticipated US strikes, and nobody can yet say why

Internet users in Tehran and several other provinces reported outages and unstable connections on Tuesday amid uncertainty over renewed US military action, after the New York Times reported that Washington could launch strikes as early as Wednesday. The disruptions mainly affected Tehran and surrounding provinces, with problems reported elsewhere in the country. CITNA, the Iranian telecoms news outlet, said the full geographic extent, the operators affected and the causes had not been officially established. APA, citing Iranian media, reported outages at Hamrah-e Aval and the Telecommunications Company of Iran in parts of Tehran alongside severe slowdowns on other operators' networks, and said users reported access to the global internet being cut off for roughly ten minutes before restoration. That figure rests on user reports relayed through Iranian media and has not been confirmed by measurement data.

The framing to resist is that Iran’s connectivity problems began with the war. ACLED’s expert comment, published roughly two weeks ago, records that restrictions were first imposed months earlier in response to nationwide anti-government protests triggered by worsening economic conditions and a collapsing currency, spreading across all 31 provinces, and then continued through the conflict period. Asked whether access had been restored after what it calls the largest state-imposed internet shutdown in modern history, ACLED’s answer was flat: “No. While internet access has been partially restored, Iran remains far from fully online. Connectivity is still extremely slow, many platforms and messaging apps remain restricted, and the VPNs many Iranians previously relied on are no longer effective or affordable.” Iran was largely cut off for much of 2026, meaning much of what happened during both the protests and the war never reached the outside world.

Assessment: Note the sourcing geometry before the substance. Iran International is funded from the Gulf and is a participant in the information conflict it covers; APA is Azerbaijani. Neither is a neutral arbiter of whether Tehran throttled deliberately, and the absence of NetBlocks or IODA curves from this cycle is the gap that matters — the shape of the drop distinguishes an administrative shutdown from a cable or power fault from an external operation. Everyone has a motive here: an outage ahead of expected strikes serves Tehran as cover and serves its adversaries as evidence of repression. Until measurement data lands, the honest position is CITNA’s own: cause unestablished.