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Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout
- dgrin91 10mo agoSeems like v4s zeroed out for a tiny bit too, but even now they are substantially lower than normal. Odd behavior, I don't know if its a precursor to an attack or some infra issue
- hvenev 10mo agoFor IPv4 the graph does not start at zero, but at around 45K.
- syncsynchalt 10mo agoCorrect, click the "Min/Max scale" toggle to get a zero-based graph that shows the v4 reduction in context.
- Weryj 10mo agoProbably more likely a internet blackout to counter the protests.
- reactordev 10mo agoConsidering the recent events going on, it’s definitely sus.
- miadabrin 10mo agofor context: There is a call to action from an opposition leader for people to join the protests today. They normally cutoff internet infrastructure on purpose in these cases so people cannot communicate
- Nicook 10mo agoYeah I am suprised everyone thinks this is necessarily internal. Could equally be related to IL/USA incoming aggression. I'd at least keep an open mind for a while.
- bawolff 10mo agoAn attack would probably undermine the protests. From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime.
- keybored 10mo ago> From a strategy perspective, probably the last thing Israel/USA want to do is give the Iranian regime a common enemy to rally around in the midst of a protest that might plausibly over throw the Iranian regime. They attacked Iran a little while ago. But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber?
- bawolff 10mo agoThere wasn't really any sort of plausible protest movement going on at the time, and the strikes did result in an upswell of regime support in the short term. It was advantagous for them to strike when they did, so they did. Its much less advantageous in this moment, so it seems less likely they will now. Or at least not overtly. > But now they are playing it cool like a cucumber? Well yes. Countries tend to do things they think will make them more powerful. Sometimes that means blowing shit up, but that is not always the right play.
- keybored 9mo agoI notice that what we in the West are doing is just Countries Doing Their Thing while the foreigners are violating humanity itself.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- edm0nd 10mo ago[flagged]
- ronsor 10mo agoNo competent network engineer wants to work in Iran, so government doesn't know how to block v6 properly. End result: just get rid of it entirely!
- School-Cotton 10mo agoWhy would they want to block IPv6 specifically?
- tguvot 10mo ago(going with recent ipv6 discussion) they probably failed to make it work properly and decided that it's easier to block it
- School-Cotton 10mo agoIs this an attempt at a joke, or do you actually seriously believe a country capable of enriching uranium isn't capable of hiring competent network engineers?
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoStuxnet v2? Speculation I know, but wow, IPv4 came back up, but IPv6 is completely out, looks like 48 million devices? Compared to IPv4's 47 thousand (wow that's insane). Looking at IPv6 its not 0 exactly, looks like probably censorship, only some devices allowed online? Some other comment mentioned there's calls to protest again today.
- anthk 10mo agoTeredo/Miredo would work on top of IPV4.
- cimi_ 10mo agoNot specific to this IPv6 event, but I was wondering what happens to public services during these Internet shutdowns? Does everything stop or it's mostly business as usual minus some things? I would imagine hospitals, tax offices etc need the internet to work?
- falaki 10mo agoIn recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
- throwaway894345 10mo agoSeems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
- ceejayoz 10mo agoIronically, their long history of shutoff and censorship probably mean they're more resilient to stuff like this.
- thaack 10mo agoMatt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet: "The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged." "Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?" https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/# https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/#
- resumenext 10mo ago[flagged]
- kaoD 10mo agoHow so?
- resumenext 10mo agoIt’s intended to be human readable, but it’s not and its slow adoption is proof of that. A random 10 digit string would arguably be better.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago> It’s intended to be human readable… What? No. Facebook did some brute forcing to slip `facebook` into their Onion URLs, but no one's intended to be typing these things out.
- School-Cotton 10mo ago> It’s intended to be human readable Says who? > slow adoption is proof of that No it's not. There are many plausible reasons for the slow pace of IPv6 adoption. Poor human-readability of addresses is among the least plausible.
- pphysch 10mo agoYou mean base64? 10 digits is only 10 billion addresses
- resumenext 9mo agoI was thinking of ipv5.
- falaki 10mo agoFortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow. [1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink.... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo
- tuhgdetzhh 10mo agoIsn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?
- adrianpike 10mo agoYes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
- falaki 10mo agoI hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
- ReptileMan 10mo agoThe Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.
- null_deref 10mo agoCan you provide a source for this claim?
- esseph 10mo agoStart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrainian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain... Scroll down to Russian use. Starlink receivers have been found in use in drones by both sides in the war. There's a lot of Open Source intel on this.
- TechSquidTV 10mo agoGovernment enacted shut down due to protests. I'd like to hear more about how they actually do this. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-cutting-internet-amid-deadly-protests/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-cutting-internet-amid-dead...
- immibis 10mo agoMost likely they just go to the head of the ISP (I bet there's only one) and say turn the internet off or else.
- mywittyname 10mo agoYou assume threats need to be made. One doesn't get to be the head of a business in a country like Iran without being a True Believer.
- ReptileMan 10mo agoI doubt there are many true believers. Most of the top brass are probably driven from sf interest. But loyalty is beyond doubt. At least until the regime is winning
- BurningFrog 10mo agoIt's enough to be a True Obeyer.
- helloaltalt 10mo agoIran is kind of like russia thinking about it. Russia's trying to censor some shit too by having outside ipv4 or something (dont know what its called) blocked and basically made a large intranet But people could still buy vps and make it work somehow So iran and russia are similar in that sense and this kinda puts things more into balance but I am sure that % of true believers/doing for self interest might vary or something
- thesdev 10mo ago
- uyzstvqs 10mo agoCan't wait for a certain dictator to get a cellmate, so that our Persian and Kurdish friends can have freedom, including free unrestricted internet access. And for fellow HN users from there, here's some great stuff: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://bitchat.free/ https://bitchat.free/
- huragok 10mo agoMbS? MbZ?
- throwaway894345 10mo agoI'm also curious about LoRA / sneakernet applications. Have those been widely used in cases of censorship?
- anakaine 10mo agoLora is fine if you want to send a very short message. Its not useful for much else. Its also not a prevalent technology compared to general.internet/mobile phone. Organising resistance with it is the pipe dream of those who play with chips and antennas, but its not something thats going to happen when crowds and mobs form up in a situation like this. Not least because the hardware is not accessible to your average citizen.
- throwaway894345 10mo agoYeah, that makes sense. I’ve curious if there are sneakernet things for communicating messages between passing mobile devices? Something that uses exist hardware and is actually used in practice.
- wiml 10mo agoThere are things like Briar, Scuttlebutt, Berty, Serval, probably more I don't know of.
- itintheory 10mo ago
- jccx70 10mo agoSoon free Coca-Cola for Iran.
- breppp 10mo agoMap of protests: https://pouyaii.github.io/Iran/ https://pouyaii.github.io/Iran/
- ukblewis 10mo agoCan you please re-share this as a separate link? It deserves it's own attention
- breppp 10mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303 There was a recent post containing a (different) map of the protests that was flagged, but here goes
- ukblewis 10mo agoThe mods here seem to definitely have an agenda… but they can’t silence us
- helloaltalt 10mo agoWhy was it flagged? What the fuck? Mods this is not okay. Don't abuse your power flagging posts about maps of protests. This is not okay.
- helloaltalt 10mo agomarcosdumay's comment of here explained situation (giving it more attention) they can censor IPv4 when they want, but they don't know how to censor IPv6. So they block it entirely. This is the reason why they aren't blacking out IPv4 From my own experience, my ex gf was iranian. She was using discord via some psiphon vpn or something iirc idk how she got access to it but she had it. I didn't trust psiphon that much so I asked her to install proton vpn and it did work. I wanted to play minecraft with her so prismlauncher but resources couldn't be downloaded so I made her download protonvpn so that she can play minecraft with me/install it (piracy was forced and also at that point necessary) She was using tlauncher which somehow worked but tlauncher was russian spyware and prism launcher was open source I talked to her about how she could use stablecoins crypto but crypto was illegal so ended up not suggesting it in the end to prevent inflation or talked to her about gold which is wild considering its like 3-4 months after we broke up but inflation is at 50% now. Anyways the point being that protonvpn worked and other vpn worked too. My question is, would things like protonvpn work after this blackout? I mean marco's and other comments in a thread explain to me that ipv4 can be blocked by them so I presume vpn's for ipv4 would shut down. And so vpns would most likely be using ipv6 which got blocked down So does that mean that now Iranian people can't access vpns? I also saw the other day some video about how when people called Iranian numbers from outside countries some random AI robot ass voice called and asked who are you and who are you talking to? And gave pause, and the most logical explaination to it was that the govt was recording these things so dont say anything to them. It was a creepypasta video. Briar might help but Briar still leaks some metadata when I talked to their authors or heard about it online. Instagram isn't blocked in Iran so are these social media apps still there after the blackout? This raises so many questions and wtf is happening in the world
- esseph 10mo agoIt depends on how they do it, but you can shut down the router ports that connect to the rest of the world easily if they want. Internet participation is voluntary between countries.
- sosborn 10mo agoMost of what's happening in the word can be boiled down to either someone craving power, or someone in power desperately struggling to hold on to it.
- amir734jj 10mo agoI'm an Iranian and this protest is very different because it's not about a specific government policy ... It's about the totality of the regime. Unfortunately, government has been following the same old brutal playbook by killing protesters and cutting off the Internet.
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- irusensei 10mo ago>American: no you are wrong... let me educate you about your own struggle.
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoHe's living in Milwaukee (per his HN about page). That doesn't make his claim to be Iranian false.
- KaiserPro 10mo agoThats such bollocks. you can't just order up a whole country protest, prolonged protest when you want. The average person in the street isn't going to protest, risk death and torture because some bloke with a dodgy accent tells them to
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- KaiserPro 10mo ago
- oncallthrow 10mo agoI sometimes feel like declaring a fatwa on IPv6 too, to be fair
- helloaltalt 10mo agoQuick question but would tor work in this case? Is this the first country which genuinely effectively is able to ban tor? Because even in China, tor can work through bridges or some other methods and even Chinese firewalls aren't so extreme as iran right now. Edit: forgot that north korea exists so I guess the second country but even in north korea there was this chinese interviewer or japanese interviewer who contacted people in north korea ig and those north koreans then interviewed for the first time completely uncensored north korea and it was brutal (a girl saying both her parents died and she was so so skinny i think) , they then went and smuggled the tapes from north korea to china and then to japan and then the company/production company or something blurred the peoples faces involved for anonymity. There's also this 1 steam connection in north korea so its just gonna be a mystery if we ever see a north korean person using a tor but I am 99% sure that it wont but north korea also got 1 steam connection so you never know.
- flotzam 10mo agoTor can reach IPv6 destinations through IPv4 entry nodes, if that's what your asking.
- helloaltalt 10mo agoIPv4 is sanctioned/heavily restricted in iran as well, I mean very high filtering The reason they didn't do this for ipv6 is because ipv6 obviously has a lot more addresses and so they just ended up blocking it whole. Atleast that's what I read in one of the comment threads discussions in here I don't think that in iran there would still be any available ipv4 entry nodes that they would allow. They would filter/block it as well?
- flotzam 10mo agoRight, I should have written "IPv4 bridges" (which can be obfuscated and distributed out of band), not "IPv4 entry nodes": https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://bridges.torproject.org/ But you can reach the IPv6 internet through those too.
- 10mo ago
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- weregiraffe 10mo agoA communications disruption could mean only one thing...
- jrochkind1 10mo agoI remember reading about how Venezuela had an internet blackout preceding US attack, presumably the blackout was an attack by US "cyber". Ah, here we are. https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/us-cyber-attack-on-venezuela-exposes-cni-vulnerabilities https://securitybrief.co.uk/story/us-cyber-attack-on-venezue... The discussion here assumes that the Iranian government is responsible for this blackout. I actually don't understand enough about network routing to undestand the OP dashboard linked to or be able to answer this question, but could it instead be the work of an opponent preparing to attack Iran?
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- xenospn 10mo agoSure thing. I’m sure Israel also caused hyperinflation and stopped the rain from falling, right?
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- xenospn 10mo agoSo you think all Iranians are just very stupid simpletons who can be convinced to go risk their lives protesting the government that easily? All because some Israelis told them to?
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- xenospn 10mo agoCan you elaborate? How exactly is this being generated? Where are the videos and images coming from? Is the Zionist propaganda also blocking all internet in Iran?
- labanimalster 10mo agoThe discussion about Starlink is interesting, but with only ~0.1% of the population having access, the real story is the 99.9% who are cut off right now. The asymmetry between those who can broadcast to the world and those who can't is staggering — and even among that 0.1%, many are too afraid to broadcast anything, knowing the risks.
- bombcar 10mo agoThe key is that the 99% can transfer data and such internally to the country; the 0.1% can then leak it out.
- jszymborski 10mo agobut, regrettably, at a trickle
- esafak 10mo agoHow effectively can they share data domestically during blackouts?
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoCarrier pigeons. And hamsters. Don't underestimate the hamsters.
- OhMeadhbh 10mo agoOh. Looks like they're not announcing V4 networks as well now.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoWe live in interesting times
- tryauuum 10mo agoI wish interesting times would come without the castrated internet
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoIf pro Iran govt then why shutdown internet and shoot protestors?
- cramsession 10mo agoWe don’t know that Iran shutdown the internet, they never claimed to do that. Any “protesters” that got shot were Israeli plants. Mind you, the US actually shot and killed a real protester yesterday.
- qbit42 10mo agoThey did shut down the Internet. I cannot communicate with some Iranian friends right now.
- cramsession 10mo agoThat doesn’t mean Iran did that. Israel has been preparing to attack Iran again, and cyberattacks on their internet are a pretty obvious first step.
- qbit42 10mo agoI see. You seem quite sure that Iran is not doing this - do you have some local source of information? My friends there said the government does shut down the internet at times (but I am not currently in communication with them...)
- cramsession 10mo agoThe people claiming Iran shut down the internet are the same people lying about the protests, even going so far as to post pro-government protests and mislabel them as anti-government protests. Israel is prepping to attack Iran and the fake “protests” are one of the first steps. We’re being lied to with impunity.
- AlessiaFiorella 10mo agoHow many conspiracy theories can people suggest instead of accepting that peaceful Iranians want to live and not be concerned that they won't have water or food to eat
- MantasPetraitis 10mo agoFree Iran from the terrorists
- cramsession 10mo ago[flagged]
- gunalx 10mo agoIts for times like this briar or similar applications are super useful. Also memory sticks. To bad distributing is not to simple.
- helloaltalt 10mo agobriar leaks some metadata from what I've heard (unconfirmed). Meshtastic seems a better alternative
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo agoI'd go with reticulum using also loras bridges. You can get data over multiple kilometers, route them to the internet easily, and with a much smarter routing scheme than meshtastic. https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/ https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- golemiprague 10mo ago[dead]
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo agoI just spent the better part of an hour, trying to track down anomalies, in one of my servers (Iran feeds us a lot of data), only to find DNS (IPv4) is not resolving. It worked fine, just a bit earlier. Ah, well...
- helloaltalt 10mo agoI created a comment in here but does this mean that you cant do something like dns tunneling in iran?
- tuktoyaktuk 10mo ago[dead]
- kittikitti 9mo agoDo people not realize how many American services block IPv6 only requests? This is an aggressively worded response. If Israel had done the same thing, people on here would applaud their cybersecurity.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoUpdate: Ipv4 had also blacked out but now its back again IPv6 is still blacked out