Sustained censorship in Iran (2026-08)
Iran · August 1, 2026 · Ongoing
OONI detected 25 days of elevated network interference averaging 19.0% anomaly rate.
Evidence
19%
Anomaly Rate
25
Measurements
75%
Confidence
What This Means
19% of tests showed anomalies, above the typical 1-3% baseline. This suggests potential network interference.
How We Detected This
Data Sourceooni
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO mean F1 0.711, honest across 131 countries)
Confidence Score75% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeAugust 1, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (41)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference41 records
blocking
"OONI signal: 33/33 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 1, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 32/32 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 1, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 34/34 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 1, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI facebook_messenger: 29/33 measurements anomalous (87.9%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.88
Aug 1, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI signal: 37/37 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 1, 2026
View source →+ 36 more OONI records
What we cannot say
- Who caused it — measurement data alone does not attribute this to any government, ISP, or other actor.
- Intent — anomalous or unreachable measurements indicate interference, not a stated motive or a deliberate-vs-incidental determination.
- Which networks — no specific ASN/ISP is identified for this incident.
- The mechanism — we cannot state whether this was DNS tampering, TLS/SNI reset, an HTTP blockpage, throttling, or an infrastructure outage.
- A confirmed duration — we report the observation window, not a verified start/stop of any block.
- Sub-national scope — measurement is aggregated at the country level; we cannot localize to a province, city, or network segment.
- Independent corroboration — this rests on a single source; treat it as a single-source signal, not a multi-source confirmation.
Cite This Incident
Voidly Research. (2026). Sustained censorship in Iran (2026-08) [IR-2026-2331]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/IR-2026-2331
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