- On Tuesday, June 17, 2025, Iran authorities call on all citizens to remove WhatsApp from their devices
- On Wednesday, NetBlocks reported a near-total internet blackout across the country
- Authorities restored access to WhatsApp in December 2024 after over 2 years of ban
Iran has called for its citizens to delete WhatsApp from their smartphones with fears that the messaging service has become a source of strategic information for its opponent in its current conflict.
As reported by the Associated Press, the Iranian state television shared the warning on Tuesday, June 17, "alleging without specific evidence that the messaging app gathered user information to send to Israel".
Meta, the company behind WhatsApp, has strongly rejected these allegations and said it's "concerned these false reports will be an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need them the most," AP reported.
Iran only recently restored access to WhatsApp, in December 2024, after a two-year ban that followed the country's mass protests over the death of Mahsa Jhina Amini at the hands of Iran's morality police.
Now, internet restrictions have once again intensified across the country since Friday, following the first Israeli airstrikes, with many citizens resorting to the VPN apps to stay connected.
On Wednesday, June 18, internet watchdog NetBlocks recorded "a near-total internet blackout" across the entire country.
Iran's shrinking internet space
As the conflict deepens, people in Iran have found themselves increasingly cut off from the global internet.
Government-imposed restrictions began last Friday (June 13), following threats of legal actions from Iran's Prosecutor General against media and social media users for content that "disrupts society's psychological security," IranWire reported.
This has fuelled a surge of VPN demand across Iran that reached peaks of an over 700% increase on Sunday.
There have also been reports of VPN throttling with users finding that their VPN apps have only been operating sporadically. Talking to TechRadar, Proton VPN confirmed the usage spike alongside a significant VPN crackdown in the region.
⚠️ Confirmed: Live network data show #Iran is now in the midst of a near-total national internet blackout; the incident follows a series of earlier partial disruptions and comes amid escalating military tensions with Israel after days of back-and-forth missile strikes 📉 pic.twitter.com/Iu598aIMRJJune 18, 2025
The incidents come after a series of partial disruptions which NetBlocks has been recording since Friday.
Major DNS provider CloudFlare also confirmed the outages, reporting a 90% drop in connectivity starting from 4 pm local time on Wednesday. These incidents do not appear to be due to infrastructure damage.
On Monday, a government spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, reportedly explained internet restrictions as "temporary, targeted, and controlled, to ward off cyberattacks" but it also prevents citizens from communicating and accessing information at the most critical of times.
Commenting on this, Proton VPN's General Manager, David Peterson, said: "In Iran, internet blackouts, as well as VPN and social media blocks have become normalized and are now another tool that the regime can turn to."
While censorship-resistant VPNs like Proton VPN can work to bypass targeted online disruptions, they cannot help during times of total internet blackout.
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