Epistemic Siege: Digital Blackout and the Fight for Meaning in Iran

By Fatemeh Shams

When the first U.S.-Israeli bombs started falling on Tehran on February 28, 2026, it wasn’t just the noise and destruction that shocked Iranian citizens. The nationwide digital blackout imposed by the government and the darkness that followed exacerbated the fear of millions of Iranians, who were cut off from any communication with the outside world. Almost overnight, Iran was thrown into a near-total digital silence. News of the outbreak of war arrived only in pieces, if at all. This was deliberate and tactical: the blackout cut off families and isolated communities, turning simple facts into rumors and confusion. In the ensuing chaos, losing digital connection became as traumatizing and devastating as the war itself.

One of the first targets hit by the bombs was the Islamic Republic Leader’s compound in downtown Tehran, killing him and more than fifty top commanders around their breakfast table. For 36 years, Ali Khamenei had positioned Iran within the framework of resistance, a politics defined not only by slogans like “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but by a continuous theater of confrontation through regional proxy wars. His regime cultivated hostility toward Washington and Tel Aviv as both a sacred duty and a historical inevitability, escalating tensions to a level that would spiral into the catastrophe we are witnessing today.

Five years and five months after the U.S. withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal, Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that led to the loss of more than 1,200 lives, and Israel to wage a war on Gaza that resulted in more than 73,000 lives lost, over 160,000 wounded, and most of the built environment and infrastructures destroyed. International humanitarian organizations and scholars of genocide recognize the assault in Gaza as genocide. Khamenei pledged unwavering support for Hamas and Hezbollah and repeatedly vowed to destroy Israel. Just six months after the Hamas-Israel ceasefire in January 2025, Israel and the United States launched attacks on Iran. On June 13, 2025, Israel targeted nuclear facilities, killing top military commanders, nuclear scientists, and at least 1,200 civilians. Nine days later, on June 22, the U.S. Air Force and Navy attacked three nuclear sites in Iran as part of the Twelve-Day War. Despite increasing international pressure, Khamenei remained firm in his rhetoric and stance. In his first public, non-televised address after the Twelve-Day War, he declared: “If the Zionist regime had not been bent down and pinned to the ground, and had been capable of defending itself, it would not have resorted to the United States in this way; but it realized that it could not handle the Islamic Republic” (July 25, 2025). Prior to the Twelve-Day war, he had repeatedly ruled out the possibility of constructive negotiations while also denying the prospect of a full-scale war: “We will not negotiate, and a war will never happen” (July 2018).

As of now, 16 days have passed since the second U.S.-Israel military attack on Iran began with the February 28 bombing of Ali Khamenei’s compound in central Tehran. The irony is harsh. The war Khamenei claimed would never happen started not under his command, but over his body, which has remained unburied for more than three weeks. But the human toll has gone far beyond the leadership and armed forces: more than 1,300 civilians have already lost their lives in Iran in the past two weeks, let alone its devastating human cost in Lebanon, with over 850 people. Over 400 victims of this war in Iran and Lebanon have been children.

The February 28 military attack on Iran did not occur in isolation. After the Twelve-Day War, Iranians endured a brief yet devastating period: daily life was heavily disrupted by a worsening economic crisis, and a collective sense of despair deepened by increased state repression and a rise in summary executions for suspected spying for Israel. The soaring prices and a currency collapse (approaching 1.4 million rials to the U.S. dollar) sparked the protests on December 28, 2025, with merchants in Alaeddin Shopping Centre in Tehran and other commercial centers, including Charsou Mall, going on strike by closing their shops. These localized protests quickly spread nationwide. As in previous protests, economic grievances soon intertwined with demands for social freedom and dignity, along with calls to overthrow a regime widely perceived as corrupt and violent. The peaceful demonstrations spread from major cities to smaller provincial towns across the country, but were ultimately halted by a brutal massacre on January 8 and 9, when tens of thousands of unarmed protesters were killed by live ammunition. Growing despair and anger intensified as prominent opposition figures and ordinary citizens were detained en masse. Families of those killed were denied their loved ones’ bodies or, in some cases, forced to pay over $4,000 in “bullet money” to recover them. Once again, any hope for lasting change from within vanished amid unprecedented brutality. By late February, Iranians faced an unimaginable collective exhaustion: economically strained, brutally oppressed, politically fractured, and emotionally drained.

When news of Ali Khamenei’s death was announced, a wave of shock and joy spread across Iran and its diaspora. Mourning dance ceremonies by the families of massacred victims moved from cemeteries and morgues to the streets. As Iranians protested nationwide and among the diaspora to celebrate the end of the dictator, the government declared ten days of national mourning. Several citizens who left their homes out of joy over Khamenei’s death were shot dead or detained. While the U.S. and Israel were raining down bombs and missiles, the state waged its own war on the people through killings, mass arrests, and a nationwide digital blackout that continues to this moment. Everyday life was shattered into irreparable fragments: no shelters or sirens, massive explosions, streets occupied by paramilitary groups who randomly stopped and confiscated belongings, queues at gas stations, and rationed fuel. In the first two weeks of war, some citizens managed to bypass the blackout by paying ransoms to VPN sellers and started tweeting as they witnessed both wars. On March 15, that narrow window of communication was shut, and an entire nation sank into darkness.

If the death of the supreme leader marked the symbolic start of the war, its destructive and lasting impact was felt by Iranian citizens on another level. Their main concern is not the spectacle of bombing but the systematic internet blackout they once again face during crisis and conflict. Before the sound of jets could be localized or the destruction mapped, navigating the war became impossible. For Iranian civilians, the war is not just the sound of fighter jets, explosions, and flames of fire, but also the failure to receive evacuation orders and warnings before bombings due to the government-imposed digital shutdown. For many Iranians without internet or satellite, news of the war — already controlled and limited by state TV— has become increasingly unreliable and hard to access. 

In a polarized information war between state propaganda and anti-regime, foreign-sponsored broadcasting channels in the diaspora, social media has became a discursive battlefield. What emerged was not a unified narrative but a mosaic of overlapping affective registers: shock, fear, bitterness, irony, exhaustion, defiance, despair, and hope.

A tweet from inside Iran posted on March 2 on Twitter/X, captures not just the struggle to connect but the lopsided nature of the story now being told:

This tweet was sent via an OpenVPN file after 6 hours of effort and testing 59 V2ray links, along with several NPV files, with help from one of my friends. The Internet in Iran, whether fixed or mobile, is cut off. We are left in the dark, and on state TV, Iran is on the verge of conquering Tel Aviv and Washington! (March 2, 2026)

In the first days of war, while people in Iran hurried to learn whether their relatives were alive, state television was busy announcing an impending victory. In the regime’s playbook, defending state sovereignty has always meant controlling the story. After the regime carried out a massacre in January 2026 under a total digital blockade, various international human rights groups warned that evidence of what they called “crimes against humanity” could be erased. During the current war, too, for many Iranians, the confusion and isolation caused by the blackout felt just as harsh as the bombs themselves:

The tension from being uninformed and without internet has hit me like a bomb, completely destroying my psyche. (March 4, 2026)

Amidst the conflict, many Iranians abroad have desperately tried to inform their loved ones inside about the evacuation warnings to no avail. The digital blackout has revealed a horrific truth to them: the impossibility of protecting their family and friends and delaying the news of war and death.

Yesterday, a friend from Germany saw an evacuation warning for a part of Tehran where another friend of ours lives and tried to contact us to let them know. When the internet gets cut off, how is someone without satellite supposed to learn about the evacuation warning?! (March 5, 2026)

As the bombs fell, the digital blackout imposed its own kind of violence. Another post from that day described the experience with unsettling precision:

My hands are shaking while I type. Something really serious must have happened. All the connections suddenly got cut. If we had ten methods that were OK for connection, nine of them got shut down. The internal net was cut too, and the method I used only stays active for a total of ten seconds before going down for up to half an hour. I think we just experienced the most intense attack in Tehran’s history, and we have no idea what happened. I doubt we can connect anymore in this situation. I’ll do everything I can to reconnect and update you. I don’t even know if this message will go through. I’m still in shock. (March 5, 2026)

The repeated cycle — cut off, reconnected, lost again — reflects a sense of collective despair and chaos. It isn’t just the bombs people feared, but the dread caused by silence and disconnection. For some, that fear has turned into dark humor. On March 9, several users tweeted with bitter irony:

The likelihood of a missile hitting me is one in a million. The chance that my current VPN won’t connect by tomorrow is 100%. And I’m more afraid of the second one. (March 9, 2026)

These tweets reveal an alternative reality: the blackout itself has become an existential threat, imposed by the state on its own citizens. As VPN prices have drastically skyrocketed, connecting to the outside world has become a luxury for ordinary Iranians, while those affiliated with the regime retain full access through the so-called “White SIM Card” to disseminate their own version of the truth. The government has further intensified the crackdown on the citizens who find a way to get through the digital darkness and connect to the outside world by mass detention of the VPN and Starlink sellers on charges of spying for Israel and illegal activity. So far at least five hundred VPN and Startlink Sellers and several online users who have used Startlink and VPNs to get online has been arrested, and the numbers are rising. By criminalization of internet usage combined with soaring price of VPS, configs and Starlink, the majority of Iranians have sunk into complete digital darkness and their account of the ongoing war and its impact on their lives have been erased. The result of the widespread digital outage has been a polarized war narrative: the distorted narrative by the regime’s representatives on social media and news outlets on the one hand, and those who openly support the continuation of the military assault on Iran from outside. The main victim of this polarization and narrative control is, as always, the Iranian people. In the past three weeks, Iranians — both inside the country and abroad — have turned to the hashtag #DigitalBlackoutinIran to share their struggles and hold the authorities accountable:

In the past one week, I’ve spent as much on configs as the cost of 1 year’s fixed home internet. Would you allow me to say it’s the fault of the cleric? (March 11, 2026)

Connect the internet! We are exhausted and broke from spending so much on all these different configs. They all get cut off after just a few days. Cutting off the internet in these tough conditions is idiotic and unfair, when misery is pouring down from earth and sky (March 15, 2026)

With explosions pounding the country, the digital blackout feels like being dragged underwater for a lot of Iranians:

Yes, Bastard! I got reconnected again. Every time I connect, it’s like surfacing for air in the water, taking a breath until this non-existent, gutless regime drowns me once more. (March 12, 2026)

Together, these fragments show that, for many, the war has not just been seen through the lens of destruction and death caused by bombs, drones, and missiles. The digital blackout’s shockwave is perceived as another form of destruction and death, one that has fractured not just means of communication but also the very possibility of understanding what is happening and of providing basic needs for self-protection.

This war’s legacy may not be limited to the damage to infrastructure or the toll on human lives, but also includes the deep rupture it has caused in the very fabric of collective perception and meaning-making, as well as the widening gap between the nation and the state. The planned digital blackout and the regime’s ongoing narrative control have done more than silence dissent; they have systematically disoriented an entire population by fracturing their epistemic foundation upon which shared reality and political agency are built. In this landscape of enforced uncertainty, the line between truth and falsehood, between events and distortion, and between war and witness has become dangerously thin. What the war on Iran has so far revealed is that modern conflict is fought not only on battlefields or in city streets but also in the contested spaces of memory, voice, and access to information. The battle for narrative, carried out through both technological suppression and human resistance, will remain central to the country’s future long after the bombs have gone silent.
 

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About the Author

Fatemeh Shams is Associate Professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her area of expertise includes literary production under authoritarian states, the social history of modern Persian literature, ideology and literary production. She is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning poet with three poetry collections. Her third collection, When They Broke Down the Door, won the Latifeh Yarshater annual book award in 2017. Her first monograph, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under the Islamic Republic, has been published by Oxford University Press. In the academic years 2021-2024, she has been a EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

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Citation: Fatemeh Shams, Epistemic Siege: Digital Blackout and the Fight for Meaning in Iran, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.03.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/64764

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