(Editor's note: I met Arash in 2018 when I went to Tehran for an Iranian game conference. The conference ran one more year and then was shut down as the government further retreated into isolation. Even while I was there, people were protesting against the restrictive rules of government - I attended a spontaneous street music performance (illegal) in which people gathered (illegal) and women danced (extra illegal). Arash is a game journalist and now game developer, with whom I have worked on two articles about the history of games in Iran. He's one of many people I met during that trip, but one of the very few who remains the country.

The people of Iran have been protesting against their country's violent rule, and are being killed for it, but nobody knows exactly how many, as the country has cut off all communication with the outside world, as well as - it seems - most communication within the country. Arash sent me this letter in the early morning of January 16, 2026, to try to reach the outside world. It got through, and I present it to you here in full, with minor grammar and syntax edits.)

From Iran without internet

As I am writing this, it is the 9th day that I am not connected to the internet.

On Thursday the 8th of January at 19:55 (local time), the Islamic Republic government cut off the internet, cellphone voice connection, SMS, and also cable telephone connections to abroad.

The only network we can connect to is an intranet called National Net which is something like a huge local network.

What We Have

Only governmental News websites work and a few local services like Snapp (an Uber-like service) and Digikala (local Iranian Amazon).

The only communication systems which are working right now are cable telephones and cellphones (voice only).

What does a country look like without internet?

I don’t know how many people have been killed in the recent protests and what is happening in my county. The national TV programs are bullshit and all propaganda, as always.

There is no popular search engine (Google or whatever), no chat clients (Whatsapp, Telegram), no social media (Instagram, X, Facebook) and even local chat clients and social media have been disabled.

All .com, .net, .org and many other top level domains are down, and only .ir websites might work.

Believe it or not there are a few news websites working, like varzesh3.ir (a sports News website) or zoomit.ir (an IT and technology website), but they don’t have any news to publish and they have disabled the comment section by the command of Intelligence Services of the Islamic Republic. You know why they disabled the comment section? Because people might use the comment section of websites to communicate with each other.

In the first two days, all payment systems were disable also. Bank transactions are based on SMS in Iran, and when the SMS system got disabled money transactions became impossible. After a day or two, the government opened up the SMS system for banks and some governmental institutes.

Game Development without Internet

As a game developer I cannot communicate with other teammates, no meetings, no voice calls and we have to use some in-house text chat system. All are tasks are pending and all online data and projects are out of reach.

The goddamn Unity engine does not work without internet properly, Figma wont open, Google Doc, Google Sheets, OneDrive, Google Drive, Atlassian could, Git, SVN, TeamCity, Microsoft365, all AI services, and all goddamn online systems are down.

My daily schedule is that I go to the office every morning and wait till afternoon for the internet to get back, it won’t, and I return home.

But you won’t believe if I tell you that DAU [ed: daily active users] for Iranian F2P games with internal servers has increased more than 5 times! Because no foreign online games work. Every day we get more and more users. Our servers are exploding! Backend and Devops friends are working day and night to keep the games online and without using the internet is it something like a miracle.

Every bad situation has some benefits I guess.

How I have reached you

I have discovered that I can connect to the internet for a few seconds early in the morning to send some messages and connect to the outside world.

I hope I can send you this email today or tomorrow. If you could publish my letter somewhere it would be very kind of you.

Any edit is allowed. Excuse my English, I don’t have any kind of dictionary to check my text.

Hope to hear from you some day.

A game developer without internet -

Arash Hackimi