Iran’s Internet blackout: a scholar’s month in the dark

You have full access to this article via your institution. As a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (see go.nature.com/4dwpazr ), I wish to add support to your News story about the bombing in Iran ( Nature 653 , 338–339; 2026 ). Amid profound grief for lives lost and the destruction caused by the US–Israeli war on Iran, I strove to uphold my daily scientific duties, including as editor-in-chief of several mathematics journals published by Springer Nature (which publishes Nature ). Yet I remained haunted by concern for my PhD students, unfinished manuscripts and stalled publications. The Internet was almost entirely inaccessible. For many, this meant ruined livelihoods; for us scientists, despair intruded on our thoughts when we tried to focus on research. I searched everywhere for functioning Wi-Fi, but it was fruitless. I turned to unofficial services, paying 85 times the pre-war rate for 5 gigabytes of data at a painfully slow 1 kilobyte per second. After two days, the VPNs I relied on ceased to work. I then paid a fortune to a stranger on the social-media service Telegram to access a VPN through the Starlink satellite network, but that, too, lasted only a few days. Even the access granted to a handful of universities soon collapsed. I considered buying a foreign SIM card from a border town, but it was risky and ultimately unfeasible. …