Amanda Meng

I got a signal message.

There had been some on-the-ground reports of network interference, and of course they wanted to know what we could see in our measurements.

And it actually took several days before we could see something abnormal in the data.

And then on January 8th, we all started to see our measurements just kind of start to fall off.

So a near complete shutdown where Iranians were no longer connected to the global internet.

The regime during times of mobilization will shut down the internet to try and suppress that mobilization as well as to control information.

Also creating that chaos of not being able to connect with people, connect to emergency services, might drive people back home out of the streets.

Yes, right.

They always offer some sort of reason or motivation and it often has to do with national security.

And so we are starting to see Google Search, Google Images, which are whitelisted applications, be accessible, but still only within the domestic internet.

Yeah.

So IOTA, it provides a public service for people to look at internet connectivity measurements anywhere in the world and see if their internet is connected, what's down, where is it down, how long has it been down.

So it provides data that's

Hopefully, people can get insights from.

Hopefully, it's actionable data on internet connectivity globally.

Yeah, in 2019, you do see routing announcements go down to, say, 60%.

So they were using this blunt force tool to take away connectivity, and they weren't able to do anything more sophisticated like whitelisting with the white SEMs or just providing access to certain people.

So they've become more sophisticated in how they're implementing their shutdowns so that they can keep online what they want to keep online.

What do you guess they're doing?

Well, I think they want to be able to communicate as government officials.