Iran International has received evidence that shows in the past 12 hours, the Islamic Republic has significantly increased its censorship activity on the Internet to a point that dozens of websites and applications have been blocked for Iranians. Internet users now must use proxies or VPN to open these websites or applications.

According to Iran International inquiries, in a rare attempt, the ministry of communications and the National Communications Company have started blocking many “.com, .net, .eu, and .ne” domains.

These filtered domains are all hosted by the popular “Cloudflare” service. The filtering has been so widespread that many websites that are hosted on Cloudflare are now unavailable in both in unsafe “http” and safe “https” modes.

The new wave of filtering has begun by the order of the Attorney General of the Islamic Republic. President Rouhani’s government has started this new wave of filtering even though in December Rouhani had “made the minister of communications promise not to push the filtering button”.

Cloudflare is an online service that over 20 million websites including Dropbox and Pinterest use, and in a way, it has become part of the Internet infrastructure in the world. Cloudflare offers services such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS).