Name: Starlink access targeted as Iran intensifies its internet shutdown | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:10:02.000Z
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Since last Thursday, the Iranian government has imposed an Internet blackout and cut off many telephone services.

That means limited images are coming out of Iran.

This one is one of the latest videos showing a protest in the capital, Tehran.

It was uploaded on Monday, though it's uncertain when it was actually shot.

Analysts say the regime has also been attempting to jam Starlink, one of the technologies Iranians have been using to sidestep the restrictions on communication.

He's the director of Internet Analysis at Kentuck, that's an Internet monitoring company, and

he's joining us from New Hampshire in the U.S.

Can you give us an idea first of all about the situation on the ground in Iran?

Does the Internet blackout mean that people are completely cut off?

This is the most severe outage we've ever seen.

There's been a few prior to this past week.

I think probably November 2019 was a high water mark for extreme Internet shutdown in this country.

But this one is most severe mostly because voice lines were down.

The internal communication was also taken out.

So I think we can interpret this as the regime is very concerned about the protests.

Now, the limited information that has come out of Iran during the first days of the shutdown was transmitted via Starlink.

Can you tell us more about that and how people had been accessing it?

Yeah, so I've been in touch with a lot of Iranian digital rights researchers.

They've been building infrastructure for a number of years now to try to be able to communicate to the outside world in the event of this kind of scenario.

So those images that we're seeing are really the fruits of that labor.

But Starlink's a key piece of that capability.

It's really the only way or any other satellite connection, but

really it's just Starlink the only way to get out a connection.

And so, yeah, so the government has been trying to.

The Iranian government has really been very upset about the fact Starlink is operating without their authorization in the country.

so they've been trying to argue with the itu, with the international organizations.

They passed a law to anybody caught using a Starlink terminal could be tried for espionage.

And then most recently they've been starting to try to jam the signal.

I think it's a little early to understand exactly how they're implementing this for those of us on the outside, but

it depends on where you are in the country.

It seems like, if you're in highly populated areas, that's kind of where they're focused on trying to use some sort of electronic warfare to prevent the Starlink signals from connecting.

Are there any other options for Iranians to connect to the outside world?

What they're doing right now is they're implementing what we call kind of a whitelisting scenario where the.

Everything's down except for a few either favored people with connections to the regime, or in the last day or two, they announced that there's going to be a handful of websites that are accessible to Iranians that are on an approved list, but

And so the options are going to be limited.

I wouldn't discount the ingenuity of the engineers in Iran to try to come up with some way to maybe leverage some of these openings to communicate to the outside world.

But as far as the 90 plus million people of the country, I think they're offline for the time being.

Okay, and what about from outside of Iran?

I mean, is there anything being done or that can be done to bring people there back online and into communication somehow?

Yeah, there's been discussion of, like, trying to smuggle in more satellite terminals.

I think that could be very difficult right now.

And at this point, I think we're relying on all the work that's been done up until now to try to create channels for communication.

It's very hard from the outside to help create more communications capability after the shutdown has begun.

All right, we'll leave it there, but thanks so much for your analysis.

That's Doug Midori from the Internet monitoring company Kentic.