January 14, 2026 — 3:44pm Save A With two words, Elon Musk changed the classic methods of revolution forever. “Activate Starlink,” he said in a social media post about Iran in 2022, suddenly giving the Islamic Republic’s 90 million citizens the possibility of accessing the internet in a way that no regime could jam or censor. It was an extraordinary challenge to a system of control painstakingly built by Iran’s leadership and enforced for decades by a ruthless security state. The regime has routinely sought to hide its blood-soaked repression of protests – and to stop opponents from communicating or organising – by disrupting the internet. Iranians attend an anti-government protest in Tehran last Thursday. Getty Images During the current unrest, the authorities have taken the draconian step of disconnecting the entire country from the internet for the first time since 2019. A national blackout has been imposed since last Thursday to dramatic effect, even disrupting phone networks and landline telephones, forcing Iran back into a pre-19th century era of communication and inflicting colossal economic damage. Advertisement High above, Musk’s constellation of SpaceX satellites was supposed to give any Iranian with a Starlink terminal – a satellite dish about the size of a laptop computer – a way of bypassing all restrictions and connecting to the internet. Up to 50,000 of these terminals are believed to be active inside Iran, defying an official ban, having been smuggled into the country since 2022, when first activated the satellite network overhead. A Starlink satellite-internet communication system antenna and router on a rooftop in Kyiv, Ukraine. Bloomberg Yet, this time, Musk’s system seems to have been outmanoeuvred as the state adjusts its tactics in an ever more sophisticated game of technological cat and mouse. The regime’s experts have so far deployed two highly effective countermeasures. They cannot jam Starlink internet connections, but they can slow them down so drastically as to make them virtually unusable. Advertisement