Forced offline for most of 2026, Iranians say they’re struggling to survive

Through months of protests, crackdowns and most recently war, she struggled to keep going. But Iran’s internet blackout has been the hardest challenge of 2026 for a 36-year-old woman from Tehran — something she calls “torture,” after losing most of her livelihood.

“We are playing for survival,” said the woman who CBC News is identifying by her initial, N. She now spends most of her time abroad. 

Like the other Iranians CBC News interviewed for this story, she fears retribution by regime authorities, for herself and her family. We have agreed not to identify her.

N’s digital marketing business went dark along with the internet as far back as January. She’s watched other job opportunities vanish. Now her last brick-and-mortar venture is teetering, like many of the country’s enterprises, including those not directly tied to the digital economy.

Even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran at the end of February, the country’s internet was a prime target for Tehran’s leaders. Early in the new year, they cracked down online, as security forces suppressed widespread street protests against the Islamic dictatorship with arrests and executions. Thousands died in the uprisings.

The internet had barely reached regular service in early February. When the war started on Feb. 28 it was switched off again. 

Since then, most Iranians have faced a near-total blackout for more than 70 days straight according to the monitor Netblocks, a longer period than any other state-ordered national shutdown.

They’ve been offline for most of 2026.

‘Huge productivity decline’

Iran has weaponized this kind of censorship before, but never so long or so absolutely — more completely than other authoritarian regimes, surpassing even the Great Firewall of China.

Iranian media activists at Filterwatch call it a government strategy of “absolute digital isolation.” 

“What makes Iran’s shutdown unprecedented is the combination of scale and severity,” said Mahsa Alimardani, an expert on internet censorship at the rights group Witness. She says most people have been redirected to Iran’s domestic intranet, a limited bare-bones alternative that only allows access to government approved sites and is plagued by frequent outages.

The blackout has cost the Iranian economy an estimated $250-million US a day directly says analyst Mahdi Ghodsi, and as much as $3-billion US a day when the impact of the lack of connectivity on banks and traditional companies is factored in, keeping them from operating fully.

“They need the internet for that,” said Ghodsi, an Iranian and a senior economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. “They need to find sellers, they need to make orders and transfer money. There’s a huge productivity decline as they’ve gone back to just phone lines.”

Job losses are estimated at two million as a result, he said, which affects as many as six to eight million people in many families with just one breadwinner.

Food stores and pharmacies seem to be the only stores reliably operating, with cafes and restaurants open but unaffordable for most, said N. A year ago, Iranian currency was trading at 42,000 rials to the U.S. dollar. Today, it takes more than 1.3 million rials to buy a dollar.

Workers flee

“Everything has basically stopped,” said P,  a 29-year-old woman who recently fled to Sri Lanka, hoping to make a living. “People aren’t working, they’re not earning and they can’t spend.” Her own livelihood depended heavily on internet access.

She says years of crippling economic sanctions by the West have now been compounded by a war and blockade, and little communication, even internally.

P had long planned to go abroad for a better life, but not to flee in desperation. “To survive, you have to leave,” she said.

With much of Iran’s economy in jeopardy, “the situation is way more unstable than it appears from the outside,” added N. 

Those at the core of the IT system who provide network and technology services see the disruption up close. Sixty-one-year-old A knows it well. He monitors it daily in Tehran. 

He describes a sophisticated tech environment that has been paralyzed, with developers and support teams unable to communicate with each other through chat apps like Telegram and WhatsApp. Any form of AI is out of reach.

Some IT workers have partial access to the internet, but connections are spotty. 

Only a trusted few in Iran are allowed unrestricted browsing, through so-called “white SIM cards.”  

It’s a far cry from Iran’s previous system where popular apps like Facebook or Instagram were technically blocked but reachable and widely used through VPN software, which also allowed for a booming online retail sector. VPNs are now mostly jammed and using a smuggled satellite service like Starlink has been criminalized.

All of this has intensified the sense of alienation and vulnerability for most of Iran’s population, including K, a 32-year-old woman who runs a hospitality service in Tehran. It has few customers — partly because few can afford it, and partly because few can find it through social media. 

“The internet has to come back. It’s an inseparable part of people’s lives,” she said. “Some people depend on it for income, some to stay connected to loved ones, and for others the psychological pressure is overwhelming,” said K.