Iran has been in turmoil since last week's disputed elections, in which both incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chief challenger, Mir Hossein Moussavi, have claimed victory. With anti-Ahmadinejad protesters relying on cell phones and social media to organize demonstrations, the US State Department has asked popular microblogging service Twitter to postpone an upgrade that could disrupt service in Iran.

The request came last week, around the time of Friday's election, according to a report by Reuters. "We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication," a State Department official told the news agency. Aside from that request, the Obama administration hasn't had much to say about the election, with the president telling reporters that he doesn't want the focus in Iran to be on the US. "It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be," Obama told reporters. "We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran."

While not confirming the existence of a request by the State Department, Twitter has decided to delay the planned network upgrade in part due to the events in Iran. "A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," cofounder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog. "In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight [Monday]. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran."

The maintenance was postponed to between 4pm and 5pm EDT Tuesday—between 1am and 2am in Tehran.

When it comes to the turmoil in Iran, the importance of social media doesn't stop with supporters of opposition candidate Moussavi looking to organize demonstrations. With foreign reporters in Iran confined to their hotel rooms and offices, unable to report on the demonstrations taking place in the Islamic Republic, tweets, text messages, and blog postings have become crucial. In fact, there has been a lot of criticism of mainstream outlets like CNN for ignoring the first day of demonstrations last Saturday, and the outrage is being expressed on Twitter using the #CNNFail hashtag.

Protesters are using StopAhmadi, mousavi1388, and IranElection for communications, and hackers are also getting in on the action. On Monday, a number of Iranian websites were knocked offline by distributed denial of service attacks. And there's an effort underway to set up proxy servers to bypass Iranian filters.