- Tuesday, June 17, 2025, Iranian authorities called on all citizens to withdraw WhatsApp from their devices
- Wednesday, Netblocks reported a used breakdown on the internet almost total across the country
- The authorities restored access to WhatsApp in December 2024 after more than 2 years of ban
Iran has called on its citizens to delete WhatsApp from their smartphones by fearing that the messaging service has become a source of strategic information for its opponent in its current conflict.
As reported by the Associated Press, Iranian state television shared the warning on Tuesday, June 17, “alleging without specific evidence that the messaging application gathered user information to send to Israel”.
Meta, the company behind Whatsapp, firmly rejected these allegations and said that it “feared that these false reports are an excuse for our services to be blocked at a time when people need it most,” said it.
Iran recently restored access to WhatsApp, in December 2024, after a two -year ban on the country’s mass demonstrations concerning the death of Mahsa Jhina Amini in the hands of the Iranian moral police.
From now on, internet restrictions have once again intensified across the country since Friday, after the first Israeli air strikes, many citizens using VPN applications to stay connected.
On Wednesday, June 18, Internet Watchdog Netblocks recorded “an almost total internet waterproofing” throughout the country.
Iran’s narrowing internet space
As the conflict deepens, the inhabitants of Iran have been more and more cut off from the world’s internet.
The restrictions imposed by the government began last Friday (June 13), following the legal threats of the Iranian prosecutor general against the media and social media users for the content which “disrupts the psychological security of society”, reported Iranwire.
This fueled an increase in demand for VPN across Iran which reached peaks of an increase of more than 700% on Sunday.
There have also been reports on the limitation of VPN with users who found that their VPN applications only operated sporadically. Speaking to Techradar, Proton VPN confirmed the point of use alongside a significant VPN repression in the region.
⚠️ Confirmed: Live network data has been #Iran is now in the middle of an almost total internet engineering failure; The incident follows a series of previous partial disturbances and intervenes in the middle of military tensions in climbing with Israel after days of missiles on the backJune 18, 2025
Incidents are involved after a series of partial disruptions that Netblocks will record since Friday.
The main DNS Cloudflare supplier has also confirmed breakdowns, reporting a 90% drop in connectivity from 4 p.m. on Wednesday. These incidents do not seem to be due to infrastructure damage.
On Monday, a government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani, would have explained the restrictions on the Internet as “temporary, targeted and controlled, to keep cyberattacks away”, but also prevents citizens from communicating and accessing the most critical information.
Commenting this, the director general of Proton VPN, David Peterson, said: “In Iran, used breakdowns on the Internet, as well as the blocks of social networks and social media have become standardized and are now another tool to which the regime can turn.”
Although Censure -resistant VPNs like Proton VPN can work to bypass targeted online disruptions, they cannot help during the periods of used breakdown on the Internet.
