Disruption on Instagram is intentional; China’s filtering system has been activated in Iran!
August 26, 1401 at 21:28
An information technology expert says that the disruption in Instagram in recent days was intentional and according to the documents, Iran’s filtering system is following the path of China’s filtering system.
In recent days, the disruption on Instagram caused many rumors about the cause of this problem. Talks were also heard about the implementation of the protection plan and its connection with the recent disturbances. Now, one of the experts in the field of information technology says that the disruption in Instagram was intentional and that the authorities are implementing China’s filtering system in Iran.
Arin Iqbal, an expert in the field of information technology and computer networks, in a conversation with Chosen, said that regarding the problems of Iranian users accessing the Instagram social network, we cannot consider this issue to be related to the slowing down of the internet speed. If the issue of internet speed reduction was discussed, the entire bandwidth should be reduced and we will notice it through Google and daily downloads; But currently we see this problem only on Instagram and a series of services like GitHub.
Arin Iqbal further added that the disruption in Instagram is intentional and if the authorities claim that international broadband or a service provider has a problem in terms of bandwidth, it is a lie. A service or service provider and international bandwidth cannot affect only Instagram and affects the entire country. When you only see this impact on a specific service, it’s definitely not a bandwidth issue.
Proving that the disruption was intentional on Instagram
This expert in the field of information technology added that the technical tests conducted by some of the software that can be used in the world show that the connection is established, we get the DNS and we can even connect to Instagram, but the connections are random and no matter how many times. One is interrupted. For example, out of the five times we go to a certain Instagram address, we don’t get an answer three times and we succeed twice. He further concluded that if there was a problem with communication in general, we should not have received an answer at all, and when we experience something like this, it means that the disruption on Instagram is intentional.
According to Arin Iqbal, if we do more advanced tests, we will see that sometimes the connection is established and during the connection, data is sent that is not related to Instagram itself. This issue, which has the fingerprint of China’s filtering service, shows that we are facing deliberate disruptions. This information technology expert said:
In the last few days, the infrastructure company sent an SMS to people in technical work and wrote that we are going to have changes and this change will disrupt the Internet and we may have an outage. This can be normal and acceptable, but the changes affect everything, if we saw only Instagram and GitHub were affected. This incident indicates the changes in the filtering system, and now the question arises, why do the changes in the filtering system affect the service that is not a filter? So probably something that is not currently filtering is experiencing disturbances.
Arin Iqbal explained that Instagram does not have just one address for connection and uses about 14 addresses for different sections such as Direct and Story, etc. Among these 14 addresses, for example, ten have problems and cannot be connected to them, but the rest of them are working. All these addresses are on the same server, and on the other hand, the Ministry of Communications claims that we had problems with the links in the north of the country. If the international link has a problem, all Instagram connections will be rejected from one link and all of them are related to the same country and in the same place in the world. Therefore, if the problem was related to international communications, they should all be disrupted, not that a few links are disrupted and the rest have no problems. This indicates that problematic links have been selected and tampered with on purpose.
Disturbances in GitHub and WhatsApp
He also stated that this service is used by programmers to upload files and codes. In recent days, a number of Github subdomains had exactly the same Instagram problem, and sometimes they are completely disconnected and sometimes slow. This problem was created almost three months ago and of course it happened a few years ago when they finally removed it from the filter. However, it has been almost three months now that we have seen these disturbances again. Two months ago the service was completely filtered and the IP was opening 10 pages of links.
Iqbal also mentioned the problems of WhatsApp and said that in the last few days, some WhatsApp addresses such as web.whatsapp return the link page address. Both WhatsApp and Instagram belong to Meta Company and Facebook, and when we saw such disruptions in this messenger, we realized that all these disruptions are from the same category and we are facing intentional disruptions on the services of Meta Company.
This information technology expert further explained about the filtering layers in the country. He said in this regard:
Filtering has several layers. The first layer is DNS, which returns a page of links when it gets the server’s IP. This layer is very easy for normal services. The second layer will be for services that have more difficult filtering and will filter them in the IP layer. So you can’t connect to the server and you go to the black hole so to speak. Currently, because many services are placed behind an IP in the new Internet model, this layer cannot be used for all services. The third layer is also called packet analysis, in which they open the packet and see its contents up to the last layer and drop it according to what service it is for. As a result of this layer, we are faced with heavy complexity.
At the end, Arian Iqbali stressed that we see the page of links only in the first layer and there are disturbances in the subsequent layers. These cases show that a complex filtering system is running. This filtering system is similar to the one implemented by China. According to internal documents, China’s filtering system has been activated in Iran.