In an effort to limit Israel's ability to wage cyberwarfare, Iran began to restrict its citizens' access to the internet and plans to completely disconnect from the global internet by Tuesday evening.
Fateme Mohajerani, a government spokeswoman, said on a recent television show that the speed reduction was “temporary, targeted and controlled, aimed at countering cyberattacks,” according to the machine translation.
The announcements come amid an escalation in the war between Iran and Israel, which erupted after Israel attacked the country on June 12, and an increase in reported internet outages.
Citizens claimed they were unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself.
Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian mobile providers were effectively taken offline on Tuesday, and the New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly difficult to obtain.
Additionally, the Iranian government is urging citizens to delete WhatsApp — one of the country’s most popular messaging platforms — claiming that the Meta-owned app has been used by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp has strongly denied these allegations in a statement to the Associated Press.) Other reports indicate that Telegram, another messaging app popular in Iran, has also been blocked.
Israel’s role in the cyber outage has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks observed a significant drop in internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 p.m. local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still be able to access the country’s state-run national internet service, although two Iranian officials told the Times that internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
