Hannah Jaffe-Walt

A shockingly effective blackout.

Did you do it over and over again?

Text message, email, nothing else was working.

Inside Iran, what was happening was, as soon as the war started, cell phones were only working to call people inside the country.

No internet.

Communication with the outside world became so difficult, it was like going from breathing regularly out in the open to being underwater and breathing through a straw.

Workarounds like VPNs are expensive or janky.

Some are flat-out scams.

And they're banned.

A private satellite service like Starlink?

illegal, and people have been arrested for using it.

So, the landline.

That was the only way Shirin's parents could reach her.

But when bombing got too intense in Tehran, they fled the city, leaving behind the landline.

And Shirin was left going for days, sometimes weeks, without hearing from them.

Were they okay?

Were they safe?

She'd go on social media, scouring every platform, looking for anyone she knew in Iran who had found some brief internet workaround to ask them if they'd heard from her parents.

I've heard a lot in the last two months during this war about deals and negotiations.

I've heard about bombings by the U.S.