Iran Digital Pulse: Code Against the Blackout
What grassroots technical resistance looks like when a government cuts 90 million people off from the open internet.
The Islamic Republic’s internet blackout has a structural gap, and Iran’s technical community found it within weeks of the February 28 shutdown: Google’s infrastructure is permitted. The state blocked most international traffic but kept Google services accessible, a concession to the practical reality that blocking Google entirely would cripple Iran’s own tech sector. That exemption became the raw material for an improvised bypass ecosystem built entirely in the open, distributed free, on GitHub. What is new is not circumvention tools for Iran, but circumvention tools built by Iranians, for Iranians, from inside the blackout itself.
We have tracked dozens of bypass tools released between February 28 and May 25. The pace of releases accelerated through March and April as developers iterated publicly and other developers forked, extended, and redistributed their work.
What the community built
The core idea driving most tools in this ecosystem is the same: disguise your internet traffic as a request to a service the government has whitelisted. In most cases right now, that service is Google. Developers built tools that wrap a user’s actual traffic inside a connection that, to the government’s filtering systems, looks like an ordinary Google request. The real destination is hidden. The encryption is end-to-end. The government’s inspection layer sees Google and lets it through.
Developers applied this insight in multiple independent ways. One tool intercepts traffic and reroutes it through Google’s domain infrastructure. It has accumulated 2.1k GitHub stars and 184 forks, and has released 21 versioned updates in roughly a month, each one a response to a change in the government’s filtering. Another tunnels traffic through Google Apps Script, a free automation service most people use for spreadsheets. The government presumably cannot block without disabling Google services entirely. A third routes encrypted data through a shared Google Drive folder: the user’s device writes traffic to the folder, an exit server outside Iran reads it and forwards it on. The phone never makes a direct connection to any blocked destination. A fourth carries internet traffic inside DNS queries, the same technical layer used for basic domain-name lookups, repurposed as a data channel.
Alongside these Google-based approaches, developers also built modified versions of existing international circumvention tools, adding controls and configuration options suited to Iran’s specific filtering environment. One such project is a community-maintained fork of Psiphon, the Canadian open-source privacy tool, adapted and maintained independently by Iranian developers.
[REDACT] described the lineage of this moment. Before December 2025, tools like pingtunnel, dnstt, and champa existed as foreign-authored hobby projects and proofs of concept. Once the shutdown began, the Iranian technical community began adapting them for the specific conditions of Iran’s filtered network, building on the publicly available code and releasing their own variants.
[REDACT] released a graphical front-end wrapping one of these relay tools, designed specifically to reduce the configuration burden for non-technical users. [REDACT] pushed an update to the Google Drive tunnel tool adding macOS support, independent exit nodes, and configuration presets.
All of these projects are distributed free. Most carry open-source licenses. None require a subscription, an account, or payment of any kind.
The developers behind them are not operating from safety. Most of them are inside Iran, subject to the same blackout as everyone else, and subject to the legal risk that comes with building tools the Islamic Republic has every interest in suppressing. The tools they are building are not for a niche audience: Iran has a population of over 90 million, more than 70 million of them internet users before the blackout began. The vast majority have no technical knowledge and no means to pay for commercial access. A handful of engineers, working in public on GitHub, are collectively maintaining the primary non-commercial pathway to the open internet for a country the size of France and Germany combined.
Not only through the internet
Not every project in this ecosystem routes traffic through the internet. One addresses a prior constraint: to use any bypass tool, you need some internet connection to begin with. Tens of millions of Iranians have none.
One activist took a different approach entirely, building a project whose mechanism routes around the internet rather than through it. A satellite broadcast displays QR codes on a television screen at regular intervals. Any Android phone with a camera can read them. The phone never touches the internet. No VPN, no account, no signup required.
[REDACT] described the design:
“The mechanism is intentionally dumb. A satellite broadcast displays QR codes on screen. Anyone with a satellite dish can tune in, and most Iranian households already have one. A free Android app reads those QR codes through the phone’s camera. The phone never touches the internet. No VPN, no account, no signup. Every broadcast is digitally signed, so the app rejects fakes. The news lands on the device, stored offline, ready to read. That is the entire system.”
The content delivered includes news from Persian and international outlets, curated posts from active Telegram channels, and functional VPN configurations, meaning that a user who receives a working config through the satellite broadcast can then use it to establish an actual internet connection.
The project’s satellite slot is funded for its first month through direct public donations. No grant, NGO, media corporation, or foreign government backing is in place. Most Iranian households own a satellite dish. The Islamic Republic has banned them for decades without enforcing the ban. The hardware infrastructure for this system was already installed in tens of millions of homes before the blackout began.
Still not a straightforward path
The output of this ecosystem is tools. Getting those tools to work, for most people, is another matter entirely.
Each tool requires a user who can find it, read the instructions in Farsi or English, install it correctly, and configure it for their specific device and connection. When the government updates its filters and the tool stops working, the user has to start over: find the new version, understand what changed, and reconfigure from scratch. This is not a one-time setup. It is an ongoing maintenance task with no predictable schedule, performed under time pressure, on a connection that may drop mid-attempt.
[REDACT] documented the process of getting online before giving up:
“I’m exhausted trying to connect. You spend hours: add a config, remove it, toggle that setting, enable this one, disable that one, airplane mode on, airplane mode off, wait 10 minutes. It didn’t work. Go clear the CDN, wait 10 minutes, toggle again, airplane mode. If that fails, go spoof a Google Drive account mixed with Google Script, target that IP, install mhrv, go into that and toggle. And even if you connect, you get speeds of maybe 100 kilobytes. Ten minutes to check Telegram and X, then it cuts. I genuinely want to imagine the internet never existed.”
[REDACT] named the cognitive load that surrounds every connection attempt: “When you want to buy a VPN in Iran, you do an MBA. Market research. Risk management.”
For people without a technical background, the barrier is not inconvenience. It is exclusion.
[REDACT]:
“I don’t want to learn how to install White CDN. I don’t want to hunt for clean CDNs. I never had interest in any of this. I love literature. I love poetry. Please connect that internet. Don’t torment us.”
[REDACT] described the state of available options:
“I’ve tried every method these last few days. The only thing that works is Google fronting, and even that isn’t reliable because it has daily limits. The paid plan I can’t buy. Internet Pro is expensive. Starlink they’ll arrest me for. What do we do? I’ll soon have no money for food either.”
There is also a safety dimension to navigating this ecosystem without guidance. Malware circulates alongside legitimate tools in the same Telegram channels people use to find working configurations.
[REDACT]:
“I downloaded a modded Hot VPN from a Telegram channel. It wiped my phone. 160 gigabytes of photos and files, gone.”
The tools released openly on GitHub, with public commit histories and versioned releases, carry a degree of auditability that anonymous Telegram distributions do not. But the people most in need of a working connection are also the least equipped to know the difference.
What the pattern indicates
The government whose constitutional obligation is to provide infrastructure for its population has instead converted internet access into a controlled, priced commodity and deployed its security apparatus against anyone attempting to route around that control. In its absence, the technical community stepped in. A small number of people with the knowledge and the willingness to take personal risk built the tools that tens of millions of people now depend on to reach news, family, and economic opportunity.
This pattern is not new in Iranian society. In the physical world, communities have long compensated for state failure through informal mutual aid: networks of neighbors, tradespeople, and professionals covering gaps the government leaves. The digital version of that response is now visible on GitHub. The difference is that the scale is radically asymmetric: a handful of developers, each maintaining a public repository, are collectively providing the primary free route to the open internet for one of the most internet-dependent young populations in the region.
Iran’s filtering apparatus updates its blocklists. The developers release a new version. The cycle has repeated thousands of times since internet access first arrived in Iran. Today, each iteration is a contest between an institution with significant resources and enforcement power, and individuals working in their spare time, in public, for free, because they decided that 90 million people deserve better than what their government is offering them.
The report covers the period February 28 to May 25, 2026 (day 87 of the blackout). Source corpus: 134,548 tweets posted by 44,297 accounts.