I’m writing this after finally regaining access to the international internet.
For roughly 86 days, people inside Iran lived through severe disruption of international connectivity. In my case, it added up to around 2,100 hours cut off from the open internet. That kind of isolation changes your sense of time. It changes how you think, how you work, how you reach people, and even how you understand what is happening around you.
Three months ago, before the war started, I posted here warning that if the US turned its threats into action, the consequences would not stay limited to Iran. My point then was simple: anyone imagining that Iran could be handled through a quick military move, with a neat political outcome and controlled economic fallout, was misunderstanding the scale of the risk.
What I feared was not just war itself, but escalation.
If Iran were attacked, it was always likely that the conflict would expand beyond its borders and affect the entire Gulf region. That would mean immediate consequences not only for Iran, but also for neighboring states, shipping routes, energy markets, supply chains, and ordinary people far from the battlefield.
A lot of people outside the region still underestimate the importance of Hormuz. This is not just another narrow waterway on the map. A huge share of global energy flows through it, and beyond oil and gas, many other industrial inputs and commodities depend on stable passage through the Gulf. Once that artery is disrupted, the effects do not remain local. Prices move. Insurance costs rise. Supply chains tighten. Food, fuel, manufacturing, transport — everything starts to feel it sooner or later.
That was the warning.
And now, after months of destruction, death, and disconnection, I think the biggest lesson is the oldest one: war is easy to start, and almost impossible to contain.
No one truly wins.
Iran has been badly damaged. Infrastructure has been hit. Families have suffered. Civilians have suffered. The human cost is real, no matter what side people support from a distance. But at the same time, the idea that a country with Iran’s size, history, social depth, and regional weight could simply be broken in a few days was always a fantasy.
You can destroy buildings faster than you can break a society.
You can impose pain faster than you can impose submission.
And you can launch a war much faster than you can control its consequences.
For me, the most personal part of this has been the long silence: being cut off from the world, unable to speak, unable to respond, unable even to follow events normally. Coming back online after 2,100 hours feels less like “returning to the internet” and more like resurfacing.
I don’t expect everyone here to agree with me politically. That’s fine.
tell us what daily life without internet is like.
(None of us here have much experience with that!)
You may not believe it, but it was really crazy. It was even harder for me than for other Iranians because I can't walk due to a 5-year illness and I'm at home all the time, and the only way I can earn money is through the internet. These three months without internet were very difficult and painful for me in many ways, and I could only entertain myself by writing my own story,,, but it was very difficult because I had no savings and to buy my medicines, which I buy every month and are quite expensive because Iran is under sanctions, I had no choice but to sell my laptop,,,, Now that I think about it, I really can't understand how those people lived a century ago or even before that. I hope neither I nor anyone else ever experiences the days I spent.
Do you feel safe right now?
Hope nothing untoward will happen to you and yours
Thank you very much, my dear, but in answer to your question, I must say that unfortunately the war is not over yet and it will not end anytime soon, but we are currently in a temporary ceasefire and things are a little calmer,,,, The internet has fortunately been connected for a few days and I can be online again and be in touch with all the people in the world. This is truly a great kindness that you cannot understand its importance until you do not have it,,, Anyway, thank you very much.
Welcome back
thank you
Were you still able to use Iran hosted services or did everything just break down?
I know it’s theoretically possible to bring up a meshnet using software like FIPS or Yggdrasil and decentralized comms protocols should be able to work, in theory, maybe even L2 Bitcoin like Lightning or Cashu.
As I see it, without prepwork iOS devices become effective paperweights, but maybe you would be able to spread sovereign tech as apks.
I really think we all should be prepared for these kind of situations, regardless of where you live. Today is a rogue state, tomorrow is a natural disaster but the outcome is similar.
Anything that needed the open internet was basically unreachable.
And for mesh or decentralized alternatives, the key thing is prep. Those ideas only help if people have already set things up before the shutdown. In our case it was sudden, and we were not prepared for it. I personally could not even get a working proxy for Telegram, so anything more advanced than that was basically impossible.
that's a good point... I'd have to look up the instructions online for how to do this, so LOL. Owned.
😂I hope you never find yourself in a situation where you need to do those things. 🙏
I made up for half of the downzapping. Offsets are a beotch.
Thank you very much, it's encouraging, but I really don't understand why my post made others angry enough to downvote me. Anyway, there are all kinds of thoughts and opinions, but I thank you very much.
Why was this downzapped 1100 sats?
slop
because some people are gay
😂It may be because of my popularity 😂
Your fascination with anything 21 knows no bound.
lol... It was actually 2,119 hours. Funny thought: if it had ended two hours later I could’ve called it 2,121 — and around here that kind of “21” usually gets noticed.
Wow...
So there was no way to communicate to the outside world?
I see some news stories about bitcoin being used in Iran, but during the internet outage that seems highly doubtful.
Yes، for ordinary people, communication with the outside world was basically cut off. Maybe some people were able to use bitcoin in normal times, but during the outage and heavy disruption, that was a very different situation. Without stable access to the open internet, VPNs, exchanges, wallet services, or foreign-hosted platforms, using bitcoin in any practical everyday way was extremely difficult for most people. So those stories may be true in general, but during that period they didn’t reflect the reality most of us were living through
Welcome back!
thank you so much,
Did you attempt to/were you able to use bitcoin in any fashion during that time? Welcome back.
No، not at all. During that period, we had no real access to the open international internet in Iran, so using bitcoin or anything else that depended on foreign services was basically impossible. The connection was heavily disrupted, international traffic was blocked, and I couldn’t even reliably get access to a VPN. Exchanges, wallets, and websites hosted outside Iran were simply unreachable. In short, for me and for many other people here, there was effectively no usable online connection to the outside world.