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Iran shut down 99 percent of its internet Thursday evening. By Saturday morning, at least fifty-one people were dead—nine of them children. Those are the numbers human rights groups could verify despite the blackout, which means the real toll is almost certainly higher.
Then President Trump stood in front of reporters Friday and said something that would have been unthinkable from any recent American president: if Iran’s government keeps killing protesters, the United States will hit them “hard where it hurts.” Not diplomacy. Not sanctions. Military action—though he quickly added “that doesn’t mean boots on the ground.”
The government had shut down the internet so thoroughly that cybersecurity experts are calling it the most complete internet shutdown in the country’s history. They shut down not just social media, but the basic internet infrastructure itself. When a government cuts off the internet that thoroughly, it’s usually because they’re about to do something they don’t want the world to see.
Trump’s Military Threat
“We will get involved,” he said, if Iranian authorities “start killing people like they have in the past.” A direct military threat, except he said troops wouldn’t be on the ground.
Trump has already bombed Iran once during this term. In June 2025, U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear facilities alongside Israel. So when he threatens military action now, Iranian leaders have recent evidence that he means it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on social media: “The United States supports the brave people of Iran.” The State Department added its own warning to Iranian officials not to “play games with President Trump,” emphasizing that “when he says he’ll do something, he means it.”
The Complete Internet Shutdown
Iran didn’t block Facebook and Twitter. They shut down domestic services too—the basic systems that make the internet work inside the country. Even Starlink uploads were disrupted, according to Ali Tehrani, who runs Washington operations for Psiphon, an anti-censorship tool. That’s significant because even satellite internet—which is supposed to be impossible to block—got disrupted.
Cybersecurity expert Amin Sabeti called it a complete severing of access to the global internet, shutting down services that stayed online during past protests. When a government goes to that much trouble to prevent documentation, they’re usually planning violence they don’t want recorded.
Behnam Ben Taleblu from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies put it bluntly: “When the internet goes dark, people die without anyone knowing.”
The blackout started Thursday evening, January 8. By Saturday morning, the death toll had reached at least fifty-one, with hundreds more injured and over two thousand detained. Those numbers come from human rights organizations working with whatever scraps of information that slip through. The real numbers are probably worse.
Congressional Response
Republican senators supported Trump’s threats. Lindsey Graham said he was “absolutely right” to support Iranian protesters. Ted Cruz argued that the protests proved the regime was “fatally weakened” and that Iranians were demanding “an end to clerical rule,” not reforms.
Democrats were more careful. Chris Murphy warned that “Iranians deserve their future in their own hands, not through bombs.” Bernie Sanders cautioned against “forcibly changing regimes” in the Middle East, pointing to failed regime change attempts in Iraq and Libya.
The real debate was whether to use military force, not whether to support the protesters.
Representative Bacon argued for deploying Voice of America and other digital tools to provide information to people cut off from global networks. It combines human rights support with the U.S.’s ability to provide technology: using infrastructure to counteract Iranian censorship.
International Coordination
Foreign ministers from Australia, Canada, and the European Union issued a joint statement Saturday praising “the bravery of the Iranian people” and condemning “the killing of protesters, violence, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation.”
They explicitly addressed the internet shutdown as a human rights violation, calling for “ensuring the right of access to information, including by restoring access to the internet for all.”
Canada’s Foreign Minister issued a statement condemning Iranian violence. The UN human rights chief, Volker Turk, said he was “deeply disturbed” by reports of violence and communications shutdowns. The emphasis across these statements on documenting human rights violations signals that the international community intends to maintain a historical record of what Iran’s government does during this period.
The Technology Battle
After the initial internet disruptions began December 29, the U.S. Treasury and State Departments provided an exception to sanctions that had restricted providing communications technologies to Iran. This allowed companies to help Iranians bypass government internet blocks.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX responded by activating Starlink service within Iran, where the satellite-based internet had previously been illegal to possess. It gave people another way to communicate when they couldn’t access conventional internet infrastructure.
But Iranian authorities fought back with blocking technology. Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights at the Miaan Group, reported observing a thirty percent loss in data packets transmitted by Starlink devices since the shutdown began. Some regions experienced 80 percent of the data being sent got blocked or lost, likely from blocking satellite signals and other technical interference.
This is a tech fight between companies trying to help Iranians stay connected and the government trying to shut everything down. It shows how private companies are now part of foreign policy response to government repression.
Why These Protests Are Different
Iran has crushed protests before. The November 2019 demonstrations ended with at least 1,500 dead and the movement suppressed through organized violence.
The economy is falling apart. The Iranian currency is nearly worthless—it takes 1.4 million rial to buy one dollar. Prices jumped 40 percent in December 2025, making basic goods unaffordable. Trump’s harsh sanctions—which he brought back after withdrawing from the nuclear deal in 2018—made people’s lives harder and angrier.
The protests span all thirty-one provinces. Previous movements have been more geographically concentrated, making them easier for security forces to suppress through focused deployment of violence.
Norman Roule, a former CIA official, declared: “This is an extraordinary moment. We are watching a regime that is clearly in its dying days.”
But intelligence assessments can be wrong. And even if the regime is vulnerable, that doesn’t mean it’s about to collapse. Vulnerable governments can still kill a lot of people.
The protests began over economic grievances but have evolved into broader challenges to the regime’s legitimacy. Women have played a prominent role, continuing the momentum from previous movements against mandatory hijab laws. Young people, facing unemployment rates exceeding twenty percent, form the core of street demonstrations.
What Iran’s Leaders Are Calculating
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded to threats by declaring that the Islamic Republic “will not back down” and that security forces would “show no leniency whatsoever toward saboteurs.”
But intelligence assessments suggest some soldiers may be unwilling to shoot protesters. The scale of the current movement may be making it hard to suppress protests everywhere at once while protecting regime-critical infrastructure.
Under those conditions, U.S. military threats might make Iran’s leaders think twice before ordering more violence. Or they might not. Foreign threats can backfire—they sometimes make people rally around their government instead.
Iranian officials have tried to frame the protests as foreign-directed operations planned and run by intelligence agencies. Trump’s visible support for protesters gives the government a way to claim the protests are foreign-controlled rather than indigenous popular discontent.
The Risk of Military Threats
If Iran’s security forces continue killing protesters at current or accelerating rates, Trump’s threats limit his options. Not following through would destroy America’s credibility and make other countries doubt its threats regarding other adversarial states watching how this plays out.
Conversely, if Trump executes military strikes as threatened, those strikes would cause serious international problems, potential retaliation from Iranian-aligned actors across the Middle East, and huge political backlash at home.
The administration hopes military threats will stop the violence without war. It depends on whether Iran’s leaders decide to keep killing, whether soldiers will keep following orders, and how strong the protest movement stays.
But threats only work if the other side believes you’ll actually do it.
The Question of What Comes After
The administration has avoided saying which group should replace Iran’s government or political movement in Iran. Trump’s comments about Reza Pahlavi, an exiled Iranian prince—who has emerged as a vocal opposition figure calling for support—have been cool. He described Pahlavi as “a nice person” but declined to hold an official meeting and stated it remained “too early” to determine who could genuinely represent the Iranian people’s will.
Openly picking a new leader would look like planning a coup, which would anger people domestically and internationally. By not saying what happens if the government falls while simultaneously expressing support for current protesters and threatening military consequences for violence, Trump keeps his options open.
It also means protesters won’t know what the U.S. will support if the government falls.
The Information Blackout
The internet shutdown keeps international observers and journalists from seeing what’s happening inside Iran. This makes it harder for leaders to decide what to do, since they can’t see if soldiers are killing too many people.
Neither Iran nor the U.S. knows what will happen next or what the ultimate consequences of current actions may be. When nobody knows what’s happening, both sides might make dangerous mistakes. Military threats might make it harder for both sides to back down without losing face should either side seek to de-escalate.
The Nobel Women’s Initiative issued a statement stressing how important internet freedom is while explicitly warning against military intervention. The statement also emphasized the particular vulnerability of women and LGBTQ+ activists within Iran, who have faced intense repression even apart from the current protest wave and may be especially endangered because they can’t use the internet to organize and report abuse.
What Happens Next
The administration seems to be keeping its options unclear: threatening military action while saying it’s watching to see what happens. This lets Trump stay flexible while showing he’s paying attention.
What happens in Iran will determine if this approach works. Whether protests keep growing. Whether soldiers kill more people or stay at current levels. Whether the internet shutdown persists or is partially lifted. These factors will determine if the U.S. needs to use military force.
As of Saturday, the blackout continues. The protests continue. The death toll continues rising, though nobody knows by how much because nobody can see what’s happening.
By threatening military action, supporting internet access, and working with allies, the administration tries to help Iranian protesters while deterring security force violence.
What we know for certain is this: people are dying in Iran right now, and their government has made sure the world can’t watch it happen. The response—threats of military action, sanctions exceptions for communication tools, international diplomatic coordination—represents an attempt to influence events occurring largely in darkness.
Iran’s neighbors are paying close attention. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, longtime rivals of Iran, haven’t said anything publicly, but they’re thinking about how this helps or hurts them. Israel, which conducted joint strikes with the U.S. on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, views the protests as potentially weakening a primary adversary. Russia and China, both with significant economic and strategic ties to Iran, have avoided commenting on the internal situation.
The economic pressure continues to mount. Iran sells more oil than before because companies find ways around sanctions, but it’s still way below what it could sell. The government has struggled to pay public sector salaries on time. Shortages of basic medicines have become routine. When people can’t afford food and medicine, protests spread beyond activists to regular people whose daily lives have become unsustainable.
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