As Iran's rial crashes to new historic lows, the main tracker of the currency has disappeared.
There is no trace of the Bonbast site, two days after the head of Iran's Central Bank accused it of fueling the devaluation of the rial by posting unofficial exchange rates.
"The Bonbast channel, which determines the dollar exchange rate for all Iranian exchange offices starting at 9 a.m., is registered in the US, and all its servers are also located there," Mohammad Reza Farzin said.
The rial, which was 45,000:1 in early 2018, sank to 822,000:1 against the US dollar earlier this week. It has lost around 25% in value since September, and around 12% since late November's rebellion that toppled Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who had been propped up for almost 14 years by Tehran's intervention.
The country is now virtually shut down to limit consumption, with industrial leaders warning that the losses already amount to tens of billions of dollars as manufacturing has fallen 30% to 50%.
Government offices in Iran are closed or operating at reduced hours. Schools and colleges are online only. Highways and shopping malls are in darkness.
Officials say there is a deficit in gas of around 350 million cubic meters a day. As temperatures plunged as low as -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) and demand spiked, authorities either had to cut gas service to residential homes or shut down the supply to power plants that generated electricity.
It chose to shut the plants, putting a priority on household consumers. By Friday, 17 power plants had been completely taken off line and the rest were only partially operational. Tavanir, the state power company, warned producers that power cuts that could last days or weeks.
Seyed Hamid Hosseini, a member of the Chamber of Commerce's energy committee, says, "The policy of the government is to prevent cutting gas and heat to homes at all costs. They are scrambling to manage the crisis and contain the damage because this is like a powder keg that can explode and create unrest across the country."
President Masoud Pezeshkian said, "We must apologize to the people that we are in a situation where they have to bear the brunt. God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen."
He appealed to the public to turn their thermostats down by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told staff to wear warmer clothes at work.
Despite being one of the world's largest oil and gas producers, Iran has long-standing issues with distribution because of poor infrastructure, management, and sanctions.
For example, Iran wastes output through flaring of gas that comes out of the ground when drilling for oil. Without the technology for collection, Iran ranked second globally in 2023 with flaring of around 21 billion cubic meters. That was more than double that of the US, which ranked fourth, and enough to supply 40% of the gas demand in neighboring Turkey, with a population similar to Iran's.
Transport from the resource-Rich south to the north, including Iran's capital Tehran and the country's largest cities, is hindered by aging transport and lack of investment. The problem was exacerbated in February when Israeli covert operations blew up two gas pipelines.
Natural gas accounts for around 70% of Iran's sources of energy, while 90% of Iranian homes rely on gas for heat and cooking. The government quietly tapped into emergency reserves to avoid service disruption to millions of people, according to an official from the oil ministry and the Chamber of Commerce's Husseini.
Pezeshkian said earlier this month, "We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money and environment. All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis."
Officials from Pezeshkian's government say their predecessors under President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, had similar problems, albeit with industrial consumers. The Trade Minister says the power cuts are because of Bitcoin mining farms.
Raisi's officials say the current government should have stockpiled enough fuel oil in the summer to supply power stations.
Iran began enforcing two-hour daily power cuts to residential homes in November to avoid using mazut, a highly polluting heavy fuel oil, in the power plants of Arak, Karaj, and Isfahan.
"It is not just for part of society to pay for electricity production with their health," said government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani.
Sephideh, a 32-year-old teacher in Tehran, says, "The power outage has severely affected daily life and work. When the power goes out, the water is also cut off, and the boilers are turned off, and, as a result, all the heating devices are out of order."