Iran executed a full-stack internet shutdown beginning at 18:45 UTC on January 8, 2026, withdrawing BGP prefix announcements nationwide and causing routing failures that prevented clients from completing TCP handshakes. Traffic dropped to effectively zero within hours of the shutdown's onset.

During the January 8–9, 2026 shutdown, Iran's .ir DNS zone became unavailable in-country, with resolution routed exclusively to a single nameserver located in Amsterdam. This infrastructure takeover was simultaneous with the routing blackout, eliminating DNS as an independent resolution path.

§Abstract deployment

The January 2026 Iranian shutdown encompassed not only global internet connectivity but also domestic inter-network connectivity and PSTN telephony — even domestic phone calls were reported impossible during the blackout period. This represents a broader telecommunications blockade beyond IP-layer isolation.

§Issue body deployment

Iran's January 8, 2026 shutdown was confirmed by Cloudflare Radar traffic telemetry showing a near-instantaneous collapse in Iranian internet traffic to effectively zero. The shutdown was implemented rapidly enough that the Cloudflare Radar timestamp (18:45 UTC) serves as a precise onset marker.

§Issue body / Cloudflare Radar source evaluation

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

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During Iran's near-complete February 2026 shutdown, DNS-based tunneling (dnstt over UDP port 53) was identified by the community as the only functioning circumvention method, with participants successfully sharing public dnstt server configurations to maintain connectivity.

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Iran experienced a near-complete internet shutdown on February 28, 2026 beginning at approximately 07:00 UTC, with Cloudflare Radar measuring ~98% connectivity loss relative to the previous week, affecting Tehran, Fars, Isfahan, Alborz Province, and Razavi Khorasan simultaneously.

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Community experimentation during the February 2026 Iran shutdown revealed heterogeneity across ISPs in what survived: participants tested different DNS resolvers and ISPs to find working dnstt paths, indicating the BGP withdrawal was not perfectly uniform across all Iranian autonomous systems.

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On Feb. 5, 2021, Campana Mythic (AS136168) announced Twitter's 104.244.42.0/24 prefix—apparently intending to blackhole Twitter traffic locally as part of the national Twitter block—but the route leaked to operators in Singapore and Vietnam, causing collateral disruption for Twitter users outside Myanmar. This accidental BGP leak corroborates evidence that Myanmar ISPs were independently implementing IP-level censorship without a centralized national kill switch.

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If India deployed centralized filtering at its key ASes, approximately 121,931 foreign-origin paths (1.15% of all Internet paths to censored sites worldwide) that transit Indian ASes would experience collateral blocking, affecting non-Indian users in Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, and elsewhere who have no connection to Indian censorship law.

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