Iran bans Gmail!

Gmail banned in Iran Since almost a week, Iranian users were experiencing trouble accessing Gmail and even Google found a huge drop in traffic from the Islamic republic of Iran only to realise the fact that the Iranian government seem to have permanently stopped all access to Gmail.

The Iranian government defends by stating that such a step was taken to start their own nationwide email service and most importantly to gain trust of their citizens.

With such a step, a whopping 23 million users won’t see the face of Gmail in their country now. Offline since February 10, Gmail services has still not re-commenced in the Iran.

Mr. Jill Hazelbaker, Google’s director of Corporate Communications, said in an email,

We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail. We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly. Whenever we encounter blocks in our services we try to resolve them as quickly as possibly because we strongly believe that people everywhere should have the ability to communicate freely online. Sadly, sometimes it is not within our control.

While the news reports are already suggesting a continuous drop in the quality of Internet services in Iran, PBS MediaSite published an article on how Iranian bloggers and journalists who wrote about human rights related to the Internet services are now facing a death sentence in Iran. It is only anyone’s guess that this has anything to do with the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on February 11.