Life has been quite rough inside Iran during the 2026 War that has been happening here. I can’t really give my opinions on the matter since there is no free speech in my country. And because of that I will be sharing how life was here during the period in terms of internet status and basic human needs.
No Internet
Just like always, the first thing that happens here in such incidents is that internet gets shutdown immediately. You can’t access anything from the outside. The intranet inside the country can’t handle high amounts of requests most of the time, and therefore suffers downtimes. Since the content that is available inside the country is extremely limited, the intranet serves little to no purpose. In case you haven’t experienced such a thing in your life here is a glimpse of how it is like:
- You can’t access music services. You start missing listening to new musics, or in case you use only music streaming services, you are left with little to no music.
- In case you are a programmer, this means that you can’t download libraries, packages or anything that requires internet. You can’t access any open source projects since they are hosted on GitHub and such. This also means you can’t download new books in case you ever want to read.
- You don’t have much entertainment available. You can’t access YouTube, social media and such. Online gaming with the rest of the world is impossible. People have come up with domestic VPNs to run LAN gaming servers, but the experience with domestic internet is ridiculous overall.
- Any business that relies on internet is damaged. Online shops suffer, tech companies suffer. People start getting fired from companies due to war, and the losses they have suffered.
- Students can’t access materials or get their questions answered quickly and easily, researches can hardly access papers, resources and do research. Those who have to present their thesis constantly have to deal with a way to just do research.
You might get a better understanding of how it’s like if you simply don’t touch internet for a few days.
In the news you constantly hear the government claiming that “this is a temporary phase and we are solely doing this for security purposes”. But the truth tells otherwise. The government has started selling the same old internet with a 40x price tag to specific groups of people. Authorized medias and groups of people are allowed to access the internet so that they can be “people’s voices” in these times. Specific groups of people can buy a limited amount of internet for a 40x price tag. Internet is now a luxury product and there is a black market for buying VPNs and Proxies. The cost ranges from 2-4$ for each gigabyte (or roughly 3.5 million Iranian rials to 6 million Iranian rials which is a crazy price tag for Iranians).
I sincerely miss accessing most basic things I could do with the internet 60 days ago. I miss watching YouTube, listening to music on Spotify, learning and playing games online. I once thought that if I remove internet from my daily life, I would have a much happier life. But the truth is that you will be much happier if you control your internet usage, not completely remove it from your life.
Using any sort of way to access the internet, including using Starlink and VPNs and Proxies can be punishable by law. You could be severely punished if you are caught with a Starlink and be labelled as a spy.
Little hope
With the news coming out, some say that the internet will be never coming back to Iranians like before. Some websites are being “whitelisted” and the internet seems to be entering a class system where not everybody can access the internet before.
You never truly appreciate a thing until it’s gone.