Many individual Iranians reported service restored Monday, though it wasn’t immediately clear if all service was back to normal.
Some thought the service failure was part of the state effort to impose a state-sponsored “halal Internet” on the country, while others thought the purpose was to bar dissidents from using the Internet and social media to promote a protest called for Tuesday this week.
If the chief goal was to foil protest planning, it seemed unlikely service would be returned to normal Monday.
Regardless, only eyes rolled at the government’s assertion day-after-day that it was unaware of any broadscale service interruption.
Iranian Internet users had been reporting error messages as they attempted to access websites like Google’s encrypted search website and popular email services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and even the content aggregating website, Balatarin.
This outage was in addition to a ban on social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and news websites such as Voice of America. Most significantly, users reported that proxy avoidance software – which is normally affective at bypassing the filters – was unable to penetrate the firewalls.
That was the main new development of the service outage, and one that had international advocates for Internet access scrambling to try to find new technology to get around Iran’s censors.
Iran’s state-owned telecommunications company repeatedly said the latest outage was not connected to it, shrugged its shoulders and declined further comment.
The Mehr news agency reported that even before this latest round of filtering, Iranian Internet users had more access difficulties, including “low speed, outage and blockage” of websites.
In all, reports indicate that about five million websites are banned by the Islamic Republic at any given time.
Some critics of President Ahmadi-nejad did not hesitate to seize on the popular dismay after the latest round of outages, denouncing the “annoying” practice of filtering.
Ahmad Tavakkoli, a senior deputy in the Majlis, demanded that the government explain the decision and warned that the filtering could have adverse ramifications for the regime.
“The new filtering measures and cutting of access to the services used by most people without prior notice… will raise the ire of the educated” people, Mehr quoted him as saying.