In a purported attempt to limit Israel’s ability to wage cyberwarfare, Iran has begun throttling its civilians’ access to the internet and plans to disconnect entirely from the global internet by Tuesday night.
2025-06-189:022226www.theverge.com
The government has also asked citizens to delete WhatsApp, and plans to shut off access to the global internet.
Fateme Mohajerani, a government spokesperson, said during a recent television broadcast that the speed reduction was “temporary, targeted, and controlled, aimed at countering cyberattacks,” according to machine translation.
The announcements come amidst the escalating war between Iran and Israel, which broke out after Israel attacked the country on June 12th, and a rise in reported internet outages. Civilians have claimed that they’ve been unable to access basic but critical telecommunications services, such as messaging apps, maps, and sometimes the internet itself. Cloudflare reported that two major Iranian cellular carriers effectively went offline on Tuesday, and The New York Times reports that even VPNs, which Iranians frequently use to access banned sites like Facebook and Instagram, have become increasingly harder to access.
Furthermore, the Iranian government is urging citizens to delete WhatsApp – one of the country’s most popular messaging platforms – claiming without any evidence that the Meta-owned app has been weaponized by Israel to spy on its users. (WhatsApp vehemently denied those claims in a statement to the Associated Press.) Other reports indicate that Telegram, another messaging app popular in Iran, has been blocked as well.
Israel’s role in the cyber outages has not been officially confirmed, but independent analysts at NetBlocks noticed a significant reduction of internet traffic originating from Iran on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 PM local time. According to Tasnim, a news network affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iranians will still have access to the country’s state-operated national internet service, though two Iranian officials told the Times that the internal bandwidth could be reduced by up to 80 percent.
Israel has experienced a 700 percent increase in cyberattacks since June 12th, according to the cybersecurity firm Radware, which attributes this to Iran’s own sophisticated state-sponsored hacking operations. National security experts also warn that American companies may experience “spillover” from continued cyberwarfare, and that if the United States intervenes in the military conflict, Iranian hackers could begin attacking critical US infrastructure in retaliation.
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Comments
By aaron695 2025-06-1810:34 [dead]
By victorbjorklund 2025-06-189:551 reply [flagged]
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-1810:062 reply [flagged]
By victorbjorklund 2025-06-1815:131 reply No, I'm making a joke about one of the most targeted strikes ever that had minimally civilian causalities. There has never ever been a war where not a single civilian got hurt by accident. But this was an attack where the % of civilians was extremely low.
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-195:54 Ah yes, people getting maimed, how funny.
Let's see how much you'll feel like joking if that lunatic Netanyahu drags us into WWIII.
It discriminated quite well. Don't buy your pagers from the same batch as Hezbollah.
Also audit your supply chain and make sure nothing is connected to Israel.
By victorbjorklund 2025-06-1815:141 reply Yea, if you are running a terrorist organization you should probably do that.
*If you're running what they consider to be a terrorist organization.
There's almost never universal agreement on what that means. I stand by my statement.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1818:381 reply There’s pretty universal agreement in this case.
Terrorist sympathizers will always claim that it’s not terrorism, but if it is, it’s justified.
October 7th was terrorism. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Israel has a right to exist. Naïve western liberals enable Hamas.
Many people argued the jewish led communist rebellions in interwar Germany were terrorism and responded in a similar way.
Again I stand by what I've written.
By IAmGraydon 2025-06-190:44 Did the Jewish led rebellions murder innocent concert goers in the most sadistic possible ways?
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1819:341 reply I’m sure you do.
You’re free to stand with a proscribed terrorist organization and a backwards unreformed religious and political system that hates Jews.
I’ll stand with the modern western liberal democracy against the terrorists.
For being pro liberal democracy your views are strikingly ethnocentric.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1821:051 reply Only one of us stands with terrorists seeking the elimination of Jews.
If you label everyone in the other ethnicity terrorists you're doing the same thing.
But I guess that's too nuanced for you.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1822:08 Hamas isn’t an ethnicity. Neither is Islam. Hating Jews isn’t an ethnicity either.
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-1810:141 reply You realise that they had no control over who was near them when the exploded ?
There are multiple videos circulating of pagers exploding in grocery stores.
Is that discriminated ?
Yep, I saw those videos too. Someone standing less than a meter away from the target walked away unscathed. Extremely precise compared to the stoneage barbarians lobbing rockets from hospitals.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1818:351 reply There’s no genocide.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1821:042 reply The Cambodian genocide that killed up to 2 million in a systematic purge?
At this point, anyone making a claim like yours should be ridiculed as a completely unserious person.
Is it the larger number that makes it genocide?
Cos they've got the "systematic" down pat.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1822:102 reply No, it’d be the systematic part. You’re being absolutely ridiculous.
By runarberg 2025-06-1821:28 [flagged]
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-1810:171 reply [flagged]
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1810:211 reply What definition of “genocide” are you using?
I’m not familiar with any existing definition that is applicable here, so I assume you must be using one I’m not aware of.
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-1810:291 reply Thankfully you do not have to take my word for it, but rather that of the United Nations or Amnesty International.
How would you describe a complete blockade, razing cities to the ground, thousands of dead children ? A civilised and fair war ?
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1810:361 reply [flagged]
By 4gotunameagain 2025-06-1810:461 reply a) you are comparing two completely different things, both in size and situation
b) the war was started and is continued by israel, when they started occupying land that does not belong to them using the BIBLE as a source for their claims for christ's sake.
The very existence of a state of israel there is western colonialism, created by the british due to the stupidity of the german nazi regime.
There would be no hamas or hezbollah if israel was not there, or at least not constantly expanding.
By frumplestlatz 2025-06-1815:32 [flagged]
By jalapeno_a 2025-06-1814:16 Israel is the one that bombs hospitals.
