A major Internet outage in Iran aimed at suppressing anti-government protests has extended into a 5th day, with access levels rising slightly as authorities said they reconnected several regions to the web.
In a series of Thursday tweets, London-based Internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Iran’s almost-total Internet shutdown began to ease after 113 hours, with the national connectivity rate rising from 5% to 10%. Connectivity had plummeted to about 5% late Saturday and mostly remained at that level until Thursday afternoon Iran time.
Iranian state news agencies reported that authorities were gradually restoring Internet access in several regions, including the southern province of Hormozgan that is home to the major port of Bandar Abbas.
Speaking to reporters in Tehran, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme Cyberspace Council Abolhassan Firouzabadi said the state body would make a decision later Thursday about whether to end the five-day Internet shutdown that has caused further damage to an economy already weakened by U.S. sanctions and government corruption and mismanagement. He expressed hope the outage would end “within the next two days.”
Iranian authorities imposed the shutdown to stop opposition activists from communicating and posting online images of nationwide protests that erupted last Friday in response to the government’s abrupt 50% increase in the subsidized price of gasoline. The protests had spread to more than 50 urban centers in Iran by Saturday, according to images received from Iran and verified by VOA Persian.
Many Iranians see the gas price increase as putting a further burden on their wallets at a time of worsening economic conditions. Iran’s currency has slumped versus the dollar, while inflation and unemployment have soared in the past year, as the U.S. has tightened economic sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to stop perceived malign behaviors. Government corruption and mismanagement also have contributed to the malaise.
“Mismanagement by the Iranian regime is helping to make the U.S. sanctions more effective,” Ilan Berman, a Middle East security analyst at the American Foreign Policy Council, said in a VOA Persian interview.
“Iranians are angry at the regime for the way it is conducting political and economic business. There is much less anger directed at the United States. Iranians know who the real culprit is,” he said.
State-approved Iranian news sites published several articles on Wednesday, highlighting ways in which the internet shutdown has been hurting the economy even more.
Economics news site Eqtesad quoted Communications Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari-Jahromi as saying online business transactions “have fallen by 90%” since the outage began.
Conservative news agency ILNA cited Tehran Chamber of Commerce member Ali Kolahi as saying the shutdown “presents us with problems in exports. We have no idea where our shipments are.”
FILE - An internet cafe manager works on his computer as a man talks on his cell phone, in Tehran, Iran, July 25, 2019.
Kolahi added that if the internet is restored “in the next couple of days, it may be possible to reverse some of the damage to our international image, but if this situation continues, it will be too late.”
The internet outage also has caused losses in the Iranian stock market, according to pro-government news site Bahar News in a report citing Investors Guild secretary Said Elsami.
In a Thursday statement, Iran’s most powerful military branch, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said it had restored “calm” to the country after suppressing the protests. State TV showed more images of pro-government rallies around the country, as it has done for the past few days.
State media have reported the arrests of at least 1,000 people whom authorities accused of engaging in violent confrontations with security personnel, damaging businesses and looting.
Many of the anti-government protests seen in videos from the first few days of the unrest were peaceful.
Iran’s ongoing internet outage made it difficult to verify whether the demonstrations had ended. VOA Persian did not receive any reports of protests in Iran on Thursday.
In a photo taken Nov. 18, 2019, and released by the Iranian Students' News Agency, ISNA, people walk past buildings which burned during protests that followed the authorities' decision to raise gasoline prices, in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran.
Iran’s government has not released figures on the numbers of people killed and wounded in the protests, besides saying several security personnel were among the dead.
British rights group Amnesty International said it received information indicating Iranian security forces had killed at least 106 protesters by Tuesday. The group said it based the figure on eyewitness accounts, social media videos and reports of exiled Iranian human rights activists.
On Wednesday, Iran’s mission to the United Nations dismissed reports of more than 100 fatalities in the unrest as “baseless.”
VOA Persian has independently confirmed the killings of at least seven protesters in shootings by Iranian security forces on Saturday.
The killings of protesters have drawn statements of concern from the United States, the U.N. human rights agency OHCHR and the EU.
In a late Wednesday tweet, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated U.S. criticism of Iran's crackdown on the protests and expressed solidarity with the Iranian people.
"As Iranians take to the streets in protest, the Ayatollahs in Tehran continue to use violence and imprisonment to oppress their people. The United States’ message is clear: the American people stand with the people of Iran," Pence said.
U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, speaking to VOA Persian on Monday, said the Trump administration has been trying to help Iran’s people to circumvent the internet shutdown, without elaborating.
Hook also called on social media companies to suspend the accounts of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohamad Javad Zarif until they turn the internet back on. All three have accounts with U.S. social media companies Twitter and Instagram.
Instagram spokesperson Stephanie Otway declined to comment on Hook’s appeal when contacted by VOA Persian.
Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokesperson, also declined a direct response to a VOA Persian query on the issue. Instead, she pointed to a company statement published last month, saying Twitter will take action against accounts of world leaders only if they use the platform to promote violence or post content deemed harmful to others.
This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. Gabriele Barbati contributed.