In the days leading up to the 14 February 2012 protests, Internet access to specific sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and "other foreign sites", along with email access, was blocked throughout Iran, affecting more than 30 million people. The sites were replaced with a message reading, "According to computer crime regulations, access to this Web site is denied." As reported by The Washington Post, a number of Iranian bloggers feared that this outage was a precursor to the implementation of the "National Internet", also known as the "Halal Internet", which would allow the Iranian government to "block 'damaging' Western Web sites".
