Iranians tap decentralised networks to reveal depths of chaos as thousands revolt: ‘Living in hell’

During a brief window of connectivity amid Iran’s crushing internet blackout this month, Darius manages to share a brief update via Telegram.

“They are afraid of the videos from protestors uploaded to the internet, so they turned off all street lights,” he shared on January 14 with the Persian-speaking Sentinel community, where he has been a long-time member.

“People are walking with smartphone lights. Nothing is good at all. They break North Korea records in censorship.”

That was roughly a week after violent protests erupted in the country after the collapse of the rial, Iran’s national currency.

Since then, Darius has been rotating through a range of internet routing tools, including Sentinel’s decentralised virtual private network, to continue circumventing the government’s strict communication blackout.

One option he has relied on is OpenVPN, a widely used tool that masks a user’s IP address. Another is Shadowsocks, which operates over the SOCKS5 protocol and disguises internet traffic as random data.

Darius has also used V2Ray, a tool that piggybacks on the security certificates of legitimate websites to conceal a user’s identity.

In exclusive messages shared with DL News, he explains what life has been like for a citizenry living in near total darkness under a violent regime.

“We are living in hell without internet, without money, without media, without any supporting [sic],” Darius, whose name has been changed to protect their identity, wrote on January 14.

“We need support. People can’t fight with empty hands. They kill us with shotgun and AK-47 [sic].”

Digital iron curtain

In response to ongoing protests that began in December and have spread far beyond the country’s capital, Tehran, the government executed one of its harshest communications blackouts in the regime’s nearly 50-year history on January 8.

The reason is two-fold, according to Adam Burns, co-founder of the Internet Society of Australia.

“It’s standard comms intelligence of just shutting it down primarily to prevent protests at an organisational level and publicity at an international level,” he told DL News.

“It’s risk management, really.”

During that time, decentralised networks and obfuscation tools have proven vital lifelines for the population.

Reports suggest that as much as 90% of the Iranian population has already used some form of circumvention tool to reach the wider world since last August.

These types of networks are typically more resilient than centralised ones with a single database or point of failure.

To destroy a decentralised network, a government must take down each self-hosted node individually — or execute a complete blackout across the entire country.

Other tools, such as Starlink, a physically distributed satellite network operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, have also been critical for citizens.

Because systems like Starlink lack a single local chokepoint, their distributed infrastructure can offer vital connectivity even under heavy censorship.

Throttling the internet to this extent, however, can cost countries billions in economic losses, according to reports.

“By providing decentralised, resilient access that withstands even aggressive censorship efforts, we’ve helped keep information flowing — allowing brave individuals inside Iran to document and share evidence of the violence, mass arrests, killings, and other human rights abuses occurring under the cover of this blackout,” Aleksandr Litreev, CEO of Sentinel, told DL News.

To be sure, it is unlikely that any type of network will be able to function during a complete blackout.

Still, during the blackout period, resourceful individuals in the country, such as Darius, have experienced brief windows of connectivity as the regime attempts to balance censorship of critics with economic priorities.

“It’s this circular cat and mouse game,” Burns said.

Darius uses his suite of tools to disguise his web requests so they appear like any other, heading toward a large Iranian e-commerce site that the government has kept online for economic reasons.

That encrypted data is then tunnelled to an external server with access to the wider internet.

It isn’t foolproof or permanent, but it has allowed Darius to send a few Telegram messages during brief windows of connectivity.

“If the patterns give the appearance of an unauthenticated connection, it will be immediately disconnected,” Darius wrote on January 23.

Iranian chaos

For the past four weeks, Iran has been living in a state of chaos.

On December 28, Iranian citizens gathered in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar to protest the government’s handling of the currency collapse.

At the end of 2025, the Iranian rial hit a historic low of 1.4 million rials per US dollar, due in part to heavy sanctions imposed by world leaders and the Iranian leadership’s financial mismanagement.

The US has targeted Iran with sanctions to deter the country from developing a nuclear weapons programme and end its support of terrorist organisations, such as Hezbollah and the Houthis.

“It is exactly like you have a shitcoin that is listed only in an isolated exchange and the price falls every day, and finally you have to pay for the first essential needs such as milk, meat, etc., the same worthless coin,” Darius writes.

“The situation can be even worse when you have to pay more to buy the same goods the next day.”

Iran operates as a theocratic republic, with the vast majority of its power in the hands of its supreme leader, cleric Ali Khamenei.

While Iran has an elected president and parliament, their power is limited. While citizens have long criticised the regime, it has been the collapsing rial that has changed the dynamic.

“Generally speaking, people don’t revolt for high-minded ideals like democracy and universal suffrage — they revolt over things that affect everyday life,” Tallha Abdulrazaq, researcher at the University of Exeter’s Strategy & Security Institute, told DL News.

“Never underestimate just how willing people are to live under authoritarian conditions so long as their basic needs are met and they see hope for the future.”

30,000 victims

Following the blackout on January 8, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitary forces began clearing the streets of protesters using live ammunition.

Due to the blackout, verifying the death toll has been a challenge for those on the ground as well as various human rights organisations.

Iran Human Rights reported at least 3,428 deaths. Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet based in London, counted at least 12,000 killed, citing internal documents from the Supreme National Security Council and the Presidential Office,

Two senior officials of Iran’s Ministry of Health told Time Magazine that from January 8 to January 9, as many as 30,000 people could have been killed.

Abdulrazaq agreed that the figure is difficult to verify but suggested it is closer to lower estimates.

“They do have the capabilities to round people up and kill them,” he told DL News.

“But, as you can imagine, that is a manpower intensive exercise so the number is probably in the low thousands at worst.”

As for toppling the regime, Abdulrazaq suggests that it won’t happen without international intervention.

“The Iranian government may have not invested in public services, but they have invested in their security apparatus and so, without foreign support through arming the protesters and effectively triggering a civil war, I don’t see how these protests will overthrow Iran,” he said.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at [email protected].