As Iran’s national internet outage continues into its second week, Starlink satellite internet service has become a crucial lifeline for many citizens to communicate with the outside world – and the government appears to be trying to shut it down.
This is prompting some Iranians to get creative in how they use the service.
In a The video was posted on Instagram Verified by NBC News, a man riding in the passenger seat of a car on an Iranian highway on Tuesday said he had a Starlink device in the car. He scrolls through his Instagram feed and visits speedtest.neta popular site for testing internet connection speeds.
“You see it for yourself,” he says of Starlink’s capabilities in the video, which NBC News translated from Persian to English.
As Iran’s crackdown on communications continues, a cat-and-mouse game ensues, as the Iranian government deploys new ways to stop or slow down Starlink communications, and activists and Starlink’s parent company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, work to circumvent them.
Opponents of the regime have been protesting in the streets across Iran for the past three weeks. The country’s leadership cut off internet and phone access last week as protests and unrest erupted in many parts of the country. It’s a tactic that Human Rights Watch says It helped the regime “conceal widespread atrocities.”
According to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 2,500 people have been killed in mass protests across the country. (The agency relies on supporters inside Iran for the information it collects and then disseminates to the public. Iranian authorities have not provided an official death toll.)
Iran has it too I put pressure on the United Nations The arm dedicated to regulating communications technology, the International Telecommunication Union, to force SpaceX to stop operating in Iran. So far, the United Nations has not done so.
The near-total ban on external communications has left Starlink, widely viewed as the most cost-effective, high-speed commercially available option for satellite Internet access, the only option for many Iranians.
In a video clip circulated on social media, body bags appear arranged in a diagnostic center and forensic laboratory in Tehran Province in the city of Kahrizak. At one point, the man filming the person he’s talking to on the phone says, “If you get a Starlink anywhere in Iran, let me know.”
But its use does not come without its own risks.
“We know, according to the law, that using Starlink is a big crime,” said Amir Rashidi, a refugee from Iran and director of Mayan Group, a nonprofit digital rights group focused on the Middle East. “I still don’t know if this might be another level of oversight.”
In addition to the ongoing blanket ban on international Internet traffic, the government also initially blocked international phone calls and access to local networks that had remained operational during previous blackouts, said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, a company that tracks Internet connectivity.
“This is one of the most severe internet shutdowns we have ever seen,” Maduri said. “A complete shutdown of the internet, blocking of international calls, and intermittent local outages, in a country of 92 million people.”
Since then, Starlink has become a hot commodity. Ahmad Ahmadian, executive director of Holistic Resilience, a nonprofit that works to connect Iranians to the Internet, said that while there is no official count of terminals in Iran, reliable estimates run into the tens of thousands.
During this total blackout, satellite internet proved to be the only way people could get information
– Ahmad Ahmadian, Executive Director of Holistic Resilience, a non-profit organization working to connect Iranians to the Internet.
Ahmadian said the Iranian government is deploying “jammers” — a misnomer, because they do not completely disable Starlink stations, but instead interfere with their traffic and can slow it down. That was mitigated somewhat when Starlink forced an update to its terminals earlier this week, he said.
“During this total blackout, satellite internet has proven to be the only way people can get information,” he said.
But Rashidi said that could soon change, as the Iranian government is actively working to improve its ability to capture Internet traffic as it travels to and from satellites and identify people using the devices.
Starlink is fairly easy to use: A person just needs a small device called a station, which can connect to fleets of low-orbit satellites that constantly orbit the Earth and provide a Wi-Fi signal to people nearby.
But until this week, many of the stations were not working for many Iranians, Ahmadian said, because they typically require a paid subscription that often does not accept money from Iranian banks and credit cards. That changed when SpaceX suddenly waived subscription fees for people in Iran, he said.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Musk, who regularly posts on X about Starlink, has not posted anything related to Iran, but earlier this month he boosted the company’s post about providing… Free service for people in Venezuela until February 3.
Ahmadian said his group and others have worked for several years to smuggle Starlink terminals into the country, with a thriving black market for them.
Rashidi said that the Internet shutdown in Iran may last for several months, and bringing terminals into the country is not easy. One activist group working to bring Starlink terminals into the country, NetFreedom Pioneers, showed just how difficult the process can be.
The group has raised nearly $50,000 on GoFundMe since June 2025, with recent donations surging coinciding with the protests. Although the terminals generally cost between $300 and $600, the group said in November that it had 17 Starlink kits delivered For people in Iran between June and September, it costs more than $18,000 to cover devices, subscriptions and the logistics of getting them into the country.
It is unlikely that most Iranians can afford this price The riyal currency fell To an all-time low against the US dollar and the euro. The country has also been paralyzed in recent years partly due to sanctions imposed by the United States and other international entities over the regime’s nuclear program.
Internet activists As I recently encouraged Those in the US are lobbying their representatives to demand that companies, including SpaceX, enable direct satellite internet to bypass the regime’s obfuscation efforts.