On May 6th, the Iranian government imposed the second internet shutdown in 12 months in the province of Khuzestan in an apparent response to protests against possible rising bread prices and rationing. As of this publication, the shutdown is ongoing, although some limited services became available on May 9.
The shutdown began when mobile data was cut off in cities of Ahvaz, Abadan, Hamidehey, Sosanger and Izeh. Soon after, local sources reported to FilterWatch that home broadband internet speeds had become extremely slow, making it almost impossible to get online. The disruption was near total in that it included mobile data shutdown and broadband throttling. Even access to Iran’s national internet was disrupted for about 48 hours, whereas past shutdowns in Iran primarily disrupted access to the international internet. In all, the shutdown is the most extensive shutdown yet in Iran on province level, subjecting at least five cities to a near total blackout for 72 hours.
Significantly, this shutdown provided a highly sophisticated level of tiered access. While individual users were blocked from accessing the internet, local data centers and, as a result, all local businesses, maintained access. In turn, local businesses and the economy are not as impacted by the shutdown.
As one local source told FilterWatch, “I am using Shatel as an internet provider in my office and home. In the office I have internet access, but at home there is no internet.” Shatel customer support told me the bandwidth is reduced and it’s out of their control,” they added.
In the past, FilterWatch has observed a similar pattern of preferential treatment and tiered access in which institutions including banks, news agencies, police stations and government offices alike have remained connected while regular Iranian users, who use the same ISPs, lose access.
The disruptions became nationwide on May 9th, when all internet service providers (ISP) dramatically slowed the speeds of their services across Iran, likely because the Iranian government ordered them to commence throttling. Cloudflare traffic data corroborated the shutdown, showing outages starting at 5:30 PM local time, May 9th, on various autonomous systems networks, including AS39650, AS43343, AS48309, AS51759. All show the network AS24631 as upstream, which was also experiencing an outage.
