Iran Internet Shutdowns Kept Traffic Near Zero for Weeks

Iran spent much of Q1 2026 with its internet cut off or heavily restricted after two nationwide shutdowns. Traffic from the country fell to near zero around 20:00 local time on January 8 and stayed there until January 21.

January 8 to January 21

A small amount of traffic returned on January 21 and disappeared a little over 24 hours later. That meant the first partial recovery gave users only a short opening before connectivity collapsed again.

January 25 and January 27

A similar brief restoration occurred on January 25. Traffic then recovered more aggressively starting on January 27, which suggests the outage eased only after several false starts rather than in one clean return to normal.

Q1 2026 disruptions

Cloudflare also observed prolonged internet blackouts in Uganda during the same quarter, along with severe weather in Portugal, cable damage in the Republic of Congo, and a technical problem at Verizon Wireless in the United States. In Uganda, domestic traffic at the Internet Exchange Point dropped from approximately 72 Gbps to 1 Gbps after the shutdown began, showing how quickly access can collapse when public connectivity is cut.

The first-quarter pattern matters because it was a stretch of repeated, government-directed disruption rather than a single isolated outage. For Iranian users, the practical question is not whether access was interrupted, but how long ordinary online life could remain only partially usable after January 27.