On Thursday 8 January, after weeks of swelling protests, Iran went dark. Almost everything went offline: internet, messaging, social media, phones. The shutdown was so severe that it has taken an unusually long time to build up a clear picture of exactly what happened in the hours and days that followed.
From across the country, however, evidence has now emerged of killing on a mass scale. Across multiple cities and towns, authorities opened fire on crowds of demonstrators, killing thousands and wounding thousands more. Getting a sense of the true scale has been incredibly difficult, with estimates of the number of dead ranging from a few thousand to more than 35,000.
