Iran’s monthslong internet shutdown is leaving many people who sell online struggling to reach customers, with the damage spreading beyond technology companies into fashion, advertising and retail as the country stays largely cut off from the global web. The Associated Press reported that for much of 2026, Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been denied regular internet access, following a series of government-imposed shutdowns that began earlier this year and tightened as the war expanded. Many businesses had relied on platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to find customers, promote services and earn income that had helped them navigate sanctions and currency pressures.
In Tehran, fashion designer Amen Khademi described how the disruption reached her day-to-day work as well as her finances. She prepared a fashion shoot for a jacket she designed with Persian-inspired motifs, but said she spent the time worrying about whether her business would survive without its main link to customers. Khademi said, “The internet outage in the past four months has completely destroyed not only my business, but many online businesses.”
The shutdown’s scope and severity have raised concerns among digital-economy experts about how quickly businesses can adapt. The AP reported that before January, authorities blocked some content and limited access to parts of the internet, but that Iranians could still reach the broader web through workarounds. Under the current controls, the AP said, all access to the global web has been shut down, and although some alternatives exist, they have become expensive and hard for many people to use.
Iran’s government has described the measures as a wartime necessity, and the AP reported that an uneasy truce with the United States and Israel has not led authorities to reverse the shutdown. The AP said the first broad cutoff happened in January during mass anti-government protests, and that the government moved to a complete blackout on Feb. 28 as the U.S. and Israel launched the war. An expert on internet censorship told the AP that countries including China and North Korea have long had strict limitations, but that Iran’s situation is different because of the “combination of scale and severity,” cutting off an entire country that had a developed digital economy and deliberately reverting it to a controlled intranet.
Some of the losses are already visible inside Iran’s digital workforce and e-commerce sector. The AP reported that DigiKala, described as a flagship online retailer, said it was laying off 200 people—about 3% of its workforce. It also reported comments by Reza Olfatnasab, head of a national group representing digital businesses, saying the pain extends to “production, foreign trade and even traditional business,” in statements published in Iranian media.
Many small and mid-sized operators say the interruption has removed their ability to sell and market services in the ways their customers expect. Khademi’s shopfront is on Instagram, and the AP said her studio’s page, which had more than 30,000 followers, has become inactive. The shutdown has also affected Farnaz Ojaghloo, a model and fitness coach who told the AP that her modeling gigs and the online courses she ran for people inside Iran and abroad have dried up. Ojaghloo said, “Psychologically, it really hits hard,” adding that “All the plans you had for six months or a year ahead get pushed aside, and your only concern becomes surviving in the moment.”
In the AP’s reporting, the fallout is also shaped by what people can no longer afford. For years, authorities enforced filters and policed content on social media, but many users could bypass restrictions with cheap virtual private networks, or VPNs. The AP reported that once the shutdown tightened, high prices for black-market VPNs put access out of reach for most Iranians, and it said state media regularly reported arrests of people for using illegal VPNs or the American satellite service Starlink, which was banned last year. The reporting also said that officials receive “white” SIM cards that grant access to the global internet, while under pressure to reduce economic harm, the government has allowed less-restricted internet access for a small number of professions, businesses and media outlets.
An e-commerce trade group in Tehran condemned what it described as a tiered system, the AP reported on Wednesday, calling it “an abuse of an obvious need of every citizen.” The group warned, according to the AP, that the outage threatens “the destruction of the country’s infrastructure at the hands of our own decision-makers,” and the AP said the vast majority of people have no practical choice but to rely on Iran’s national net.
Advertising and creator businesses described how quickly sponsor and audience demand collapses when platforms can’t be used normally. A Tehran resident who works in advertising told the AP sponsors were reluctant to pay for content that could not be posted on major platforms such as Instagram, and he said his income had fallen to near zero since the war began. A gamer in Isfahan, also with a large following on YouTube and Instagram, told the AP that Iran’s domestic internet is “terrible”—slow, insecure and full of bugs—and that he has lost almost all income from sponsors and donations.
The AP said Iran has domestic social-media platforms modeled on services like WhatsApp and YouTube, but that content is monitored and often censored. The gamer and an advertising worker both spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns, and the AP reported the gamer as saying, “Nobody really wants to use these platforms, but there is no other option.” The reporting described the broader effect as deepening economic stress in a population already under strain from inflation and earlier declines in living standards.
Beyond online sellers, the consequences are showing up in physical street-level commerce, the AP said. It reported that economic decline has contributed to waves of anti-government protests, most recently in December, and that some people are considering emigration. A software developer told the AP on condition of anonymity that the shutdown has wiped out remote work, and that he lost his job when his former company laid off almost all its employees in recent weeks. The AP said it also saw rising numbers of street vendors in Tehran; it described Reza Amiri, a 32-year-old former employee of an internet provider who now sells hats and umbrellas by a metro stop after losing his job when the war started, and said Amiri reported not receiving his last month’s salary. It also reported Monireh Pishgahi, who sells ornaments and accessories on Vali Asr Street and told the AP that her tailoring business used to supply three online shops but shut down and laid off five employees as business dried up, along with a shopkeeper, Mohammad Rihai, who said he gave up trying to persuade street vendors to stop blocking sidewalks outside his store.