Iranian Students' News Agency

Iranian Students' News Agency was established in December 1999 in order to report on news from Iranian universities.

During the period of 1999 to 2005, "While taking a reformist view of events, ISNA managed to remain politically independent. It, however, maintained its loyalty to the former president and carried a section devoted to "Khatami's perspectives". It was considered "the official voice of Iranian students", However, after Khatami's era, due to changes in the political environment (Ahmadinejad era) and leaving of its first managing director, ISNA has been seen as losing its reformist streak.

In January 2005 a server called The Planet unilaterally stopped hosting the website of the ISNA. ISNA said that they did not receive a reason for the closure, and had only been informed 48 hours before the move. An Iranian government official later accused the United States of ordering the shutdown. The incident led to new calls for Iran to develop its own satellite communication technology.

After Abolfazl Fateh's resignation in September 2005, Mehdi Nad'alizadeh, ISNA's head of political news was appointed as ISNA's director. He was replaced by Hamid Hasan-Zadeh in 2007.

In 2011, Fateh defended his doctoral thesis, "The Power of News Production", citing ISNA's novel and unique journalistic presence in the 1999-2005 period, and that "it provided the best possible and strategic way to set up a relatively reliable but constant information flow in the country during this period" and "introduce[d] a workable model that can potentially be replicated in the region".

On 28 February 2026, the BBC reported that the Telegram channel of the hard-line Hamshahri daily claimed that several Iranian state-linked news and media outlets had been targeted by cyberattacks following the strikes on Iran by the US and Israel. Initial reports by the channel stated that the semi-official ISNA and IRNA websites were reportedly hacked or experienced access issues.