Iran’s internet shutdowns in late 2025 and early 2026 disrupted domestic crypto operations and exposed material operational risk for miners and users inside the country. The outages effectively pushed large portions of mining activity and retail access offline, showing how connectivity constraints can translate into immediate crypto-service failure.
The impact splits into two layers. Iran faced direct financial and operational damage, while the global Bitcoin network saw only a limited—yet instructive—effect because Iran’s share of worldwide hash rate was described as relatively modest.
What the shutdowns did to mining and retail access
The most severe 2025 episode lasted about 12 days and was described as a near-total digital siege. The disruption was attributed to DNS manipulation, protocol whitelisting, and deep-packet inspection that constrained normal internet routing and access. Analysts cited acute economic damage during the outage, including a reported loss figure of roughly $1.5 million per hour, alongside significant downtime for both licensed and illicit miners.
Operationally, the failure mode was not abstract—it was mechanical. Miners lost the ability to coordinate with pools, missed payouts, faced delays in firmware patching, and absorbed extended downtime that compounded losses. One report placed Iran’s contribution to global mining in the low single digits, commonly estimated around 2% to 4%, implying that a shutdown would remove less than 5% of global hash rate while still inflicting severe localized costs.
Why Bitcoin stayed up and what still broke in practice
Bitcoin’s protocol has previously absorbed large shocks, including the 2021 removal of a substantial portion of global hash rate, through automatic difficulty adjustments and node redundancy. Mechanisms such as difficulty retargeting and distributed block propagation are designed to mitigate short-term hash rate volatility, and mining pools often use redundancy and job caching to cushion intermittent connectivity loss.
You can mine 1 Bitcoin in Iran for $1,300 and sell it for $108,000.
Is Iran nice this time of year? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/u8vYuUjeZU
— Bitcoin Archive (@BitcoinArchive) October 19, 2025
At the same time, the Iran episode shows the hard boundary between protocol resilience and real-world constraints. State control over internet access and energy can materially impair the practical availability of crypto services even when the underlying protocol continues to function. For custodians and regulated providers, the lesson is governance-focused: regional infrastructure controls must be modeled as operational risk, not treated as an edge case.
Within the blackout conditions, workarounds were described, but each had limitations. Satellite internet and specialist Bitcoin data broadcasts could help users receive blockchain data offline, yet full transaction broadcast still required a return path to the network. Mesh and peer-to-peer channels like Bluetooth networks enabled limited local sharing of transaction data until broader connectivity returned. Offline signing and self-custody practices, including partially signed Bitcoin transactions (PSBTs), reduced exposure during gaps by allowing preparation without immediate broadcast capability.
For exchanges, custodians, and issuers, this is a practical stress-test scenario. Decentralized protocol resilience can coexist with centralized points of failure at the physical layer, meaning continuity planning must cover alternative communications, settlement integrity, and regional infrastructure interruptions. Auditors and compliance teams also need to treat these disruptions as input variables for operational-risk frameworks and incident reporting expectations.
