Authorities in Iran are reportedly blocking access to secure, encrypted Web sites, which include things like online banking and any others sites using the HTTPS protocol.

Authorities in Iran are reportedly blocking access to secure, encrypted Web sites, which include things like online banking and any others sites using the HTTPS protocol.

Iran has long blocked access to certain Web content, but tech-savvy citizens have gotten around it via proxy servers and other portals. The Washington Post reported Thursday, however, that some Iranians have recently had difficulty getting online through those channels.

"It seems that the authorities are increasingly getting the upper hand online," one blogger told the Post.

Since then, other reports of Web blockades have popped up online. A Hacker News post from Sara70 said that "since Thursday Iranian government has shutted [sic] down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible."

Any websites that rely on Google APIs, like Wolfram Alpha, or HTTPs are inaccessible, she said. "Also accessing many proxies is also impossible," she wrote.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed that the company's services have been blocked in the country, including encrypted search, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Videos. She pointed to the company's transparency tool, which shows that Gmail activity in Iran has "flatlined."

Sara70 suggested that the shutdown was related to the 33rd anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but as Ars Technica pointed out, a commenter on the post said encrypted connections have "been disabled for a few months."

The Internet issues come about seven months after it was revealed that that would block any website the government deems inappropriate.

Iranian officials are framing the effort as a way to protect citizens from companies like Google, Twitter, and Microsoft, which the government says are working with U.S. officials to spy on Iranians. The tech firms have denied the allegations. Not surprisingly, average Iranians don't see it that way, with some abandoning the Web because there's nothing interesting to access.

"None of the fun sites such as Facebook work anymore. All I can read is official Iranian news Web sites," one user told the Post.

Internet troubles in the Middle East are nothing new. In the wake of the Arab Spring uprising last year, Web access was completely cut off in , , and as protestors used social networks like Twitter and Facebook as organizational tools.

Last year, meanwhile, Netherlands-based DigiNotar, which issues certificates that validate Web sites as legitimate, disclosed that it had been hacked. An investigation into the effect of the intrusion found that, among other things, the hack possibly compromised the , prompting the search giant to suggest that users secure their data.