I’m writing this from a small desk in Tehran. For the first time in 288 hours, my terminal finally pinged a server outside the national intranet.
If you’ve never experienced a total "Internet Blackout," it’s hard to describe the psychological and economic claustrophobia. For 12 days, Iran was effectively a digital island. The reason? Widespread civil unrest and protests that escalated into nationwide chaos. To curb the coordination of these movements, the state pulled the ultimate kill-switch on global connectivity.
As someone who lives and breathes the tech ecosystem, I want to share what this actually looks like on the ground, beyond the headlines.
- The Economic Hemorrhage
We talk a lot about "uptime" in our industry, but imagine an entire country’s private sector going 0% uptime.
DevOps & Remote Work: For those of us working for international clients, 12 days of silence is a professional death sentence. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose when you "vanish."
The Logistics Nightmare: Everything from supply chains to simple ride-sharing apps that rely on mapping APIs (like Google Maps) broke down.
The Crypto Paradox: In a country with high inflation, many use crypto as a hedge. During the blackout, we couldn't check prices, manage nodes, or move assets to liquid markets. We were stuck watching our purchasing power evaporate while being unable to hit 'Sell.' - The Human & Mental Toll
It’s not just about losing money; it’s about the loss of agency. Being restricted to a "National Intranet" feels like being in a room with no windows. You can access your local bank, but you can't reach your colleagues, your data on GitHub, or even basic documentation on Stack Overflow. The anxiety of being disconnected from the collective knowledge of humanity is a unique kind of trauma for any knowledge worker. - Why This Matters to the Stacker News Community
This experience is a brutal reminder of why decentralization isn't just a buzzword—it’s a survival requirement. When a single entity can toggle the "Off" switch for 85 million people, the fragility of our current web infrastructure becomes terrifyingly clear.
We are seeing a massive shift in the local mindset here. People are no longer just asking for "better internet"; they are looking for peer-to-peer mesh networks, robust offline tools, and censorship-resistant protocols that don't rely on a central gateway.
I’m back for now, catching up on 12 days of missed commits and lost opportunities. But the lesson remains: If your livelihood depends on a centralized pipe, you’re always one political decision away from total insolvency.
Stay sovereign.
#InternetShutdown #Censorship #Privacy #Infrastructure #Decentralization #Bitcoin #Iran
Internet is not a blessing... is a nightmare. A tool of control.
We will be better people without internet.
Without internet, people will start knowing each others and rely more on local communities than some weirdos online.
I get your point about the 'Panopticon' aspect of the web, but honestly? It’s a lot easier to romanticize a 'No-Internet world' when you have the option to opt-out.
When it’s forced on you by the state, it doesn’t feel like a return to local community; it feels like an isolation ward. In a modern economy, being offline doesn't just mean 'no social media'—it means you can't pay your bills, your business bleeds out, and you're cut off from the global market of ideas.
Total control isn't just watching what we do online; it's also having the power to decide if we can communicate at all. I’d rather fight the 'nightmare' of the internet with encryption than live in the 'blessing' of a digital dark age
If your business depends of internet, it means you are running the wrong business.
To produce food and basic necessities do not require internet.
So be happy when the state will cut your internet... THEY CANNOT CONTROL YOU ANYMORE.
That’s a tough take to defend in 2026. Unless you’re running a 19th-century blacksmith shop, your business is tied to the global network. Even the most hardcore Bitcoiners rely on the internet to propagate blocks and reach consensus.
Saying it’s the 'wrong business' because it needs connectivity is like saying a heart is the 'wrong organ' because it needs oxygen. We don't need less internet; we need a more resilient, decentralized one that doesn't have a single point of failure at the government's ISP cabinet
Is silly to think that you can achieve that meanwhile you are still supporting the state...
Stop voting, stop believing in gov "authority", stop paying taxes and then we can talk about "decentralization"...
Decentralization start when you stop being a statist cuck.
It's easy to preach 'agorism' and 'not paying taxes' when you're sitting behind a keyboard in a place where the rule of law actually exists to protect your dissent.
When you live in a place where the state can physically disconnect you from the world, freeze your local bank account at the press of a button, and has a monopoly on violence, 'stop voting' isn't a strategy—it's the default reality.
Decentralization isn't a lifestyle choice for us; it’s a necessity for survival. We use these tools precisely because we are forced to live under that authority, not because we 'believe' in it. Talking down to people who are actually facing the consequences of centralized power doesn't make you more decentralized; it just makes you out of touch with how the world works outside your bubble
What is "rule of law" ? Obeying the state rules but crying online about how the state cut your internet?
What is the law in the end ?
A piece of paper where it says I should obey it? Is it a contract ? Where did I sign that contract?
We can debate the 'Social Contract' all day, but that doesn't fix the infrastructure. While you're busy with semantics, we're focused on building workarounds for a digital siege. I'm interested in P2P resilience, not philosophy. Unless you have a technical solution for offline connectivity, I’m moving on
I tried to keep up with friends whose families are in Iran, and with each passing day they become increasingly frustrated and scared by not knowing what is going on. I really feel for them.
Have you found a workaround to get online, or has the internet returned more broadly across the population?
Are that any tools you know of today that could have reliably connected people during this episode?
I hope you and your loved ones are all ssfe and sound.
Thanks for the kind words and the support, man. It means a lot. To answer your questions:
Yes, it has returned more broadly over the last 24 hours, but it’s 'limping.' International bandwidth is throttled, and most global platforms are still heavily filtered. We are back online, but we’re all behind several layers of VPNs and proxies just to reach basic services.
During the total blackout, there were almost zero workarounds for average users because the domestic 'intranet' was physically severed from the global gateways. Some folks with satellite setups (very risky and expensive here) stayed connected, but for the rest of us, it was a complete dead zone.
This is the billion-dollar question. We’ve looked into mesh networks (like Briar over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi for local messaging), but they have limited range. Tools like Snowflake (Tor) or specialized V2Ray configurations help once there’s some connection, but during a total kill-switch event, we are essentially waiting for a more mature decentralized satellite infrastructure that doesn't rely on local ground stations.
We’re safe for now, just trying to pick up the pieces. Truly appreciate you checking in on the situation here.
How did the inability to use Waze affect your walking paths, during interesting times?
Honestly, it felt like being blindfolded in your own neighborhood. You don't realize how much you rely on that 'blue dot' until it disappears.
During those days, my walking paths were dictated by what I could see at the next intersection rather than what an app told me. You start looking for alternative cues—smoke, the sound of sirens, or just the 'vibe' of a crowd. Local shopkeepers basically became my offline Waze; I’d ask them which streets were blocked or where the 'hot zones' were.
It’s a weird, stressful way to navigate a city you’ve lived in your whole life. You’re basically forced to build a mental map in real-time based on word-of-mouth. It really hits home how fragile our 'smart' lives are when the plug is pulled
yeah; if they weren't the ears of the marketplace, why would anyone believe that prices are efficient?
I have so many more questions for you, although due to respect for mental bandwidth and the risks you might incur each time you attach your digital hose to the server, I'll read a bit more of what you might have posted previously about your specific situation before bothering you with more effectively public chitchat.
The blackout you wrote about does not just highlight political suppression but reveals something deeper about the inherently brittle architecture of the centralized web. We have built our communications financial systems and cultural exchanges on top of a network that has single points of failure at the national level. That is not just an Iranian problem it is an everywhere problem waiting to happen as the political will arises.
The real value in your account is the human dimension. Uptime metrics do not capture the slow psychological erosion that happens when your ability to interact collaborate and create is suddenly walled off. This is why infrastructure conversations need to move from convenience toward resilience. It is not enough to demand faster speeds or cheaper data plans. We need truly sovereign tools that can operate independently when the main arteries are severed.
Mesh networks community hosted servers distributed storage and local transaction systems are no longer hobby projects or fringe experiments. In situations like yours they become lifelines. Your experience should be a case study for developers investors and policymakers around the world. If they wait until an outage occurs on their own soil it will already be too late to design and deploy alternatives.
What happened in those twelve days is a reminder that the internet is not a given. It is a construct and any construct can be dismantled. The time to harden it is now.
This is exactly why we build. 'Access volatility' is just as dangerous as price volatility if you can't hit the sell button or manage your node. Thanks for sharing this perspective—it’s easy to forget the stakes when you’re not the one in the digital island. Stay sovereign.
Spot on. In the West, 'uptime' is a metric for SLAs; here, it’s a metric for financial survival. When you're disconnected, you realize that true sovereignty isn't just about holding your keys, but also about having a resilient path to the network. We’re learning the hard way that our stacks need to be as robust as our convictions. Thanks for the support."