Iran's Internet Network Completely Disabled After Protests Due to Economic Crisis

JAKARTA - Internet signals across Iran have reportedly disappeared. This total blackout occurred on Thursday, January 8, suddenly so that millions of people lost access to communication with other countries.

This problem occurs when Iran is hit by economic issues, where many people are carrying out large-scale demonstrations. The value of the Iranian currency has fallen so that thousands of people, including those in Tehran, have protested about the rising prices of goods and the increasingly scarce basic necessities.

Various institutions that monitor global internet traffic recorded a drastic decrease in connectivity around 20.00 local time or 23.30 WIB. This blackout is suspected to have occurred because the government is trying to hinder the coordination of mass demonstrations and the dissemination of information related to riots.

"I think we are now almost completely cut off from the outside world," Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity researcher from the Miaan Group organization, told TechCrunch, reported on Friday, January 9.

Cloudflare also confirmed that Iran was indeed offline when the outage occurred even though they were still seeing a small amount of data traffic. This disruption is known to affect not only the local network, but also international telephone networks.

Until now, the Iranian government has not given an official statement regarding the cause of the internet outage. The Foreign Ministry's website was also inaccessible during the signal cut. Until this news was made, there was no information regarding the restoration of connectivity in Iran.

The protest action due to the economic crisis is known to have occurred for twelve days. Traditional markets in Tehran are also known to be closed as a form of support for the action. Seeing this situation, the government moved quickly by deploying security forces to a number of areas crowded with the masses.