Digital censorship analysts argue current outage is mostly about survival and control for the country’s rulers

• US-Israel war on Iran – live updates

Roughly four hours after the first strikes hit Iran, the country was again plunged into a full internet blackout – severely curtailing the information that has left the country and the ability of Iranians to communicate with each other.

A small fraction of this blackout appears to be a result of infrastructure damage caused by US or Israeli strikes, possibly to a fibre optic cable, according to Doug Madory, at the internet analytics firm Kentik. There appeared to be several small outages affecting multiple networks, which could be caused by technical failures such as a fibre cut or power outage, he said.