VPN use skyrockets in Iran as citizens navigate internet censorship under Tehran’s crackdown
Iranians protest to demand justice and highlight the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police and subsequently died in hospital in Tehran under suspicious circumstances.
Mike Kemp | In Pictures via Getty Images
Iranians are turning to virtual private networks to bypass widespread internet disruptions as the government tries to conceal its crackdown on mass protests.
Outages first started hitting Iran’s telecommunications networks on Sept 19., according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks.
Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they’re seeing “curfew-style” network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night.
Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years.
As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps.
On Sept. 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site.
By Sept. 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said.
“Social media plays a crucial role in protests all around the world,” Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN, told CNBC. “It allows protesters to organize and ensure the authorities can’t control the narrative and suppress evidence of human rights abuses.”
“The Iranian authorities’ decision to block access to these platforms as the protests erupted has caused demand for VPNs to skyrocket,” he added.
Demand is much higher than during the uprisings of 2019, which were triggered by rising fuel prices and led to a near-total internet blackout for 12 days. Back then, peak demand was only around 164% higher than usual, according to Migliano.
Nationwide protests over Iran’s strict Islamic dress code began on Sept. 16 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman. Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained — and allegedly struck — by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for wearing her hijab too loosely. Iranian authorities denied any wrongdoing and claimed Amini died of a heart attack.
At least 154 people have been killed in the protests, including children, according to the nongovernmental group Iran Human Rights. The government has reported 41 deaths. Tehran has sought to prevent the sharing of images of its crackdown and hamper communication aimed at organizing further demonstrations.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Why VPNs are popular in Iran
VPNs are a common way for people under regimes with strict internet controls to access blocked services. In China, for instance, they’re often used as a workaround to restrictions on Western platforms blocked by Beijing, including Google, Facebook and Twitter. Homegrown platforms like Tencent’s WeChat are extremely limited in terms of what can be said by users.
Russia saw a similar rise in demand for VPNs in March after Moscow tightened internet curbs following the invasion of Ukraine.
Swiss startup Proton said it saw daily signups to its VPN service balloon as much as 5,000% at the peak of the Iran protests compared to average levels. Proton is best known as the creator of ProtonMail, a popular privacy-focused email service.
“Since the killing of Mahsa Amini, we have seen a huge uptick in demand for Proton VPN,” Proton CEO and founder Andy Yen told CNBC. “Even prior to that, though, VPN usage is high in Iran due to censorship and fears of surveillance.”
“Historically, we have seen internet crackdowns during periods of unrest in Iran which lead to a rise in VPN usage.”
The most popular VPN services during the protests in Iran have been Lantern, Mullvad and Psiphon, according to Top10VPN, with ExpressVPN also seeing big increases. Some VPNs are free to use, while others require a monthly subscription.
Not a silver bullet
The use of VPNs in tightly restricted countries like Iran hasn’t been without its challenges.
“It is fairly easy for regimes to block the IP addresses of the VPN servers as they can be found quite easily,” said Deryck Mitchelson, field chief information security officer for the EMEA region at Check Point Software.
“For that reason you will find that open VPNs are only available for a short duration before they are identified and blocked.”
Periodic internet outages in Iran have “continued daily in a curfew-style rolling manner,” said NetBlocks, in a blog post. The disruption “affects connectivity at the network layer,” NetBlocks said, meaning they’re not easily solved through the use of VPNs.
Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she’s been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN.
“This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they’ve developed to make the network extremely unreliable,” she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network.
Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added.
Yen said Proton has “anti-censorship technologies” built into its VPN software to “ensure connectivity even under challenging network conditions.”
VPNs aren’t the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or “proxies,” on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a “relay” network around the world to obfuscate their activity.
“As well as VPNs, Iranians have also been downloading Tor in significantly greater numbers than usual,” said Yen.
Meanwhile, encrypted messaging app Signal compiled a guide on how Iranians can use proxies to bypass censorship and access the Signal app, which was blocked in Iran last year. Proxies serve a similar purpose as Tor, tunneling traffic through a community of computers to help users in countries where online access is restricted preserve anonymity.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.
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