Internet Went Out in January. Iran Is Still Paying for It.

When Iran's government shut down the internet in January to suppress nationwide protests, officials calculated it was a price worth paying. Months later, with the blackout still in effect and the war with the United States and Israel raging, the bill has grown far beyond what anyone in Tehran apparently anticipated.

The shutdown is now confirmed to be the longest state-imposed national internet blackout ever recorded in any country. It began on January 8 amid mass protests, eased briefly in late January, then was reimposed nearly in full when U.S. and Israeli strikes began on February 28. Since then, connectivity has hovered at between 1 and 2 percent of ordinary levels, according to NetBlocks, the global internet monitor that has tracked the blackout throughout. Citizens have spent roughly 70 percent of 2026 so far without meaningful access to the internet, the CBC reported Sunday.

The economic toll is staggering, and the figures vary depending on whether direct or indirect costs are counted, but every available estimate is severe.

The Numbers

Iran's own Communications Minister, Sattar Hashemi, acknowledged the shutdown was costing the economy $35.7 million per day in direct losses. NetBlocks put its own estimate at roughly $37 million per day. Those figures, covering direct digital-sector losses, represent the floor.

Independent economists place the true daily cost considerably higher. Analyst Afshin Kolahi estimated the direct cost at between $30 and $40 million per day, but said adding indirect costs, supply chain disruption, investor flight, and compounding inflation brings the true figure closer to $70 to $80 million per day. Mahdi Ghodsi, a senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told CBC News the blackout was costing the economy an estimated $250 million per day in direct terms, and as much as $3 billion per day when the full impact on banks and traditional companies unable to operate without connectivity is included.

As of mid-April, NetBlocks estimated the first 48 days of the current war-era blackout had cost the Iranian economy more than $1.8 billion, a figure corroborated by Iran's Chamber of Commerce and by Human Rights Activists in Iran. Bloomberg reported Saturday that by this week the total figure tracked by NetBlocks had surpassed $2.6 billion. One Iranian economic outlet, Donya-ye Eghtesad, has put the cumulative toll across both waves of the blackout at approximately $5.2 billion.

Online sales collapsed by 80 percent during peak blackout periods. The Tehran Stock Exchange lost 450,000 index points in just four days. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of employees across digital sector companies now face layoffs, with many startups pushed to outright bankruptcy, unable to service tax obligations and contractual commitments while revenues collapsed.

Life Inside the Blackout

The human dimension is just as stark. Iran has a smartphone penetration rate of 134 percent, meaning most Iranians rely on their devices for work, communication, commerce, and information. Cutting the internet has not merely inconvenienced people, it has severed livelihoods.

"The wave of job cuts, the economic shock and the recession that we're now seeing is mainly because of the digital siege, not the bombs," one business owner named Amir told Business Standard. Job losses from the blackout are estimated at two million, which Ghodsi says affects as many as six to eight million people in families with a single breadwinner.

A 36-year-old digital marketing business owner from Tehran, identified only as N by CBC News due to fears of retribution, described the experience as "torture." Her business went dark with the internet in January. She has watched job opportunities vanish and her last remaining venture is now teetering. "Everything has basically stopped," said another Iranian, a 29-year-old woman who recently fled to Sri Lanka, speaking to CBC.

An IT worker in Tehran told CBC he monitors the disruption daily and described a once-sophisticated technology environment now paralyzed, with developers and support teams unable to communicate through apps like Telegram and WhatsApp, and AI tools entirely out of reach.

Two Internets: One for the Regime, One for Everyone Else

In response to growing economic pressure, the government introduced a scheme called "Internet Pro," a tiered, permission-based access program approved by the Supreme National Security Council that grants selected businesses, professionals, and institutions filtered access to the global internet via so-called "white SIM cards" linked to national ID verification.

But the program has itself become a flashpoint. CNN reported Sunday that Internet Pro has effectively created two classes of Iranian: a digital elite with working connectivity, and ordinary citizens confined to a bare-bones domestic intranet of government-approved sites plagued by frequent outages. Arguments over who gets access have spilled into public media and reached the highest levels of government.

President Masoud Pezeshkian's office said his government opposes tiered access and that the restrictions are unfair. Iran's vice president for women's affairs warned that the blackout disproportionately harms women, who make up the majority of self-employed small business owners relying on e-commerce and social media for their income. Even Communications Minister Hashemi, who acknowledged the daily financial cost, asserted that high-quality internet access was every Iranian's right.

"Imagine dealing with unemployment and crazy inflation, and somehow managing to scrape together 500,000 or a million tomans, only to spend it on a couple of gigabytes of VPN just so you can get on X or check the news," Faraz, a 38-year-old Tehran resident, told CNN.

Why the Blackout Persists

NetBlocks director Alp Toker told NPR that Iran's leaders imposed the blackout for two overlapping reasons: to control the population's ability to speak out, and to reduce the perceived risk of digital espionage by U.S. and Israeli forces during active military operations. Both rationales made a degree of operational sense during the acute phase of the war. What has drawn condemnation from economists, human rights groups, and even members of the Iranian government itself is that the blackout has continued for 20 days after the April 8 ceasefire, with no official timeline for restoration.

"I get the sense that we're in for the long haul," Toker said.

An Iranian member of parliament, Amir-Hossein Sabeti, confirmed the Supreme National Security Council ordered the shutdown because "many nuclei of rebellion were seeking to destabilize the country." Iran's Deputy Communications Minister acknowledged that full disconnection is "the most expensive scenario for the economy."

The regime appears to be making a political calculation that the cost of restoring the internet, in terms of the information and protest-coordination it would enable, outweighs the economic cost of keeping it off. For the millions of Iranians who have spent most of 2026 in a digital void, that calculation has a very concrete price.