Iran’s internet blackout leaves public in dark and creates an uneven picture of the war with Israel

As the war between Israel and Iran hits the one-week mark, Iranians have spent nearly half of the conflict in a near-communication blackout, unable to connect not only with the outside world but also with their neighbors and loved ones across the country.

Civilians are left unaware of when and where Israel will strike next, despite Israeli forces issuing warnings through their Persian-language online channels. When the missiles land, disconnected phone and web services mean not knowing for hours or days if their family or friends are among the victims. That’s left many scrambling on various social media apps to see what’s happening — again, only a glimpse of life able to reach the internet in a nation of over 80 million people.

Activists see it as a form of psychological warfare for a nation all too familiar with state information controls and targeted internet shutdowns during protests and unrest.

“The Iranian regime controls the information sphere really, really tightly,” Marwa Fatafta, the Berlin-based policy and advocacy director for digital rights group Access Now, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We know why the Iranian regime shuts down. It wants to control information. So their goal is quite clear.”

War with Israel tightens information space

But this time, it’s happening during a deadly conflict that erupted on June 13 with Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generals, and nuclear scientists. At least 657 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran, and more than 2,000 wounded, according to a Washington-based group called Human Rights Activists.

Iran has retaliated by firing 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli military estimates. Most have been shot down by Israel’s multitiered air defenses, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds of others wounded. Guidance from Israeli authorities, as well as round-the-clock news broadcasts, flows freely and consistently to Israeli citizens, creating in the last seven days an uneven picture of the death and destruction brought by the war.

The Iranian government contended Friday that it was Israel who was “waging a war on truth and human conscience.” In a post on X, a social media platform blocked for many of its citizens, Iran’s Foreign Ministry asserted Israel had banned foreign media from covering missile strikes.

The statement added that Iran would organize “global press tours to expose Israel’s war crimes” in the country. Iran is one of the world’s top jailers of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and in the best of times, reporters face strict restrictions.

Internet-access advocacy group NetBlocks.org reported on Friday that Iran had been disconnected from the global internet for 36 hours, with its live metrics showing that national connectivity remained at only a few percentage points of normal levels. The group said a handful of users have been able to maintain connectivity through virtual private networks.

Few avenues exist to get information

Those lucky few have become lifelines for Iranians left in the dark. In recent days, those who have gained access to mobile internet for a limited time describe using that fleeting opportunity to make calls on behalf of others, checking in on elderly parents and grandparents, and locating those who have fled Tehran.

The only access to information Iranians do have is limited to websites in the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, Iran’s state-run television and radio stations offer irregular updates on what’s happening inside the country, instead focusing their time on the damage wrought by their strikes on Israel.

The lack of information going in or out of Iran is stunning, considering that the advancement of technology in recent decades has only brought far-flung conflicts in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere directly to a person’s phone anywhere in the world.

That direct line has been seen by experts as a powerful tool to shift public opinion about any ongoing conflict and potentially force the international community to take a side. It has also turned into real action from world leaders under public and online pressure to act or use their power to bring an end to the fighting.

But Mehdi Yahyanejad, a key figure in promoting internet freedom in Iran, said that the Islamic Republic is seeking to “purport an image” of strength, one that depicts only the narrative that Israel is being destroyed by sophisticated Iranian weapons that include ballistic missiles with multiple warheads.

“I think most likely they’re just afraid of the internet getting used to cause mass unrest in the next phase of whatever is happening,” Yahayanejad said. “I mean, some of it could be, of course, planned by the Israelis through their agents on the ground, and some of this could be just a spontaneous unrest by the population once they figure out that the Iranian government is badly weakened.

U.S. strikes on several Iranian nuclear sites represent a meaningful escalation of the Middle East conflict that could lead Tehran to disrupt vital exports of oil and gas from the region, sparking a surge in energy prices. But history tells us that any disruption would likely be short-lived.

Investors and energy markets have been on high alert since Israel launched a wave of surprise airstrikes across Iran on June 13, fearing disruption to oil and gas flows out of the Middle East, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz, opens new tab, a chokepoint between Iran and Oman through which around 20% of global oil and gas demand flows.

Benchmark Brent crude prices have risen by 10% to over $77 a barrel since June 13.

While Israel and Iran have targeted elements of each other's energy infrastructure, there has been no significant disruption to maritime activity in the region so far.

But President Donald Trump's decision to join Israel by bombing three of Iran's main nuclear sites in the early hours of Sunday could alter Tehran's calculus. Iran, left with few cards to play, could retaliate by hitting U.S. targets across the region and disrupting oil flows.

While such a move would almost certainly lead to a sharp spike in global energy prices, history and current market dynamics suggest any move would likely be less damaging than investors may fear.

CAN THEY DO IT?

The first question to ask is whether Iran is actually capable of seriously disrupting or blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

The answer is probably yes. Iran could attempt to lay mines across the Strait, which is 55 km (34 miles) wide at its narrowest point. The country's army or the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) could also try to strike or seize vessels in the Gulf, a method they have used on several occasions in recent years.

Moreover, while Hormuz has never been fully blocked, it has been disrupted several times.

During the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the two sides engaged in the so-called "Tanker Wars" in the Gulf. Iraq targeted Iranian ships, and Iran attacked commercial ships, including Saudi and Kuwaiti oil tankers and even U.S. navy ships.

Following appeals from Kuwait, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan deployed the navy between 1987 and 1988 to protect convoys of oil tankers in what was known as Operation Earnest Will. It concluded shortly after a U.S. navy ship shot down Air Iran flight 655, killing all of its 290 passengers on board.

Tensions in the strait flared up again at the end of 2007 in a series of skirmishes between the Iranian and U.S. navies. This included one incident where Iranian speedboats approached U.S. warships, though no shots were fired.

In April 2023, Iranian troops seized the Advantage Sweet crude tanker, which was chartered by Chevron, in the Gulf of Oman. The vessel was released more than a year later.

Iranian disruption of maritime traffic through the Gulf is therefore certainly not unprecedented, but any attempt would likely be met by a rapid, forceful response from the U.S. navy, limiting the likelihood of a persistent supply shock.

HISTORY LESSON

Indeed, history has shown that severe disruptions to global oil supplies have tended to be short-lived.

Iraq's invasion of neighbouring Kuwait in August 1991 caused the price of Brent crude to double to $40 a barrel by mid-October. Prices returned to the pre-invasion level by January 1992 when a U.S.-led coalition started Operation Desert Storm, which led to the liberation of Kuwait the following month.

The start of the second Gulf war between March and May 2003 was even less impactful. A 46% rally in the lead-up to the war between November 2002 and March 2003 was quickly reversed in the days preceding the start of the U.S.-led military campaign.

Similarly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a sharp rally in oil prices to $130 a barrel, but prices returned to their pre-invasion levels of $95 by mid-August.

These relatively quick reversals of oil price spikes were largely thanks to the ample spare production capacity available at the time and the fact that the rapid oil price increase curbed demand, says Tamas Varga, an analyst at oil brokerage PVM.

Global oil markets were also rocked during the 1973 Arab oil embargo and after the 1979 revolution in Iran, when strikes on the country's oilfields severely disrupted production. But those did not involve the blocking of Hormuz and were not met with a direct U.S. military response.

SPARE CAPACITY

The current global oil market certainly has spare capacity. OPEC+, an alliance of producing nations, today holds around 5.7 million barrels per day in excess capacity, of which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold 4.2 million bpd.

The concern today is that the vast majority of the oil from Saudi Arabia and the UAE is shipped via the Strait of Hormuz.

The two Gulf powers could bypass the strait by oil pipelines, however. Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, producing around 9 million bpd, has a crude pipeline that runs from the Abqaiq oilfield on the Gulf coast in the east to the Red Sea port city of Yanbu in the west. The pipeline has capacity of 5 million bpd and was able to temporarily expand its capacity by another 2 million bpd in 2019.

The UAE, which produced 3.3 million bpd of crude oil in April, has a 1.5 million bpd pipeline linking its onshore oilfields to the Fujairah oil terminal that is east of the Strait of Hormuz.

But this western route could be exposed to attacks from the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, who have severely disrupted shipping through the Suez Canal in recent years. Additionally, Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar currently have no clear alternatives to the strait.

Iran may choose not to take the dramatic step of blocking the strait in part because doing so would disrupt its own oil exports. Tehran may also consider any further escalation fruitless in light of U.S. involvement and will instead try to downplay the importance of the U.S. strikes and come back to nuclear negotiations.

In the meantime, spooked energy markets, fearing further escalation, are apt to respond to the U.S. strikes with a sharp jump in crude prices. But even in a doomsday scenario where the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, history suggests markets should not expect any supply shock to be persistent.