President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered Iran's internet blackout lifted on Monday 25 May 2026, and NetBlocks, the connectivity monitor, confirmed partial restoration on Tuesday 26 May after 2,093 hours, the longest nationwide shutdown in modern record1. The blackout had run from 28 February, the first day of the conflict, sealing a population off from the very negotiations its own foreign ministry was conducting abroad and costing more than $1 billion cumulatively. For ordinary Iranians the order opens the first uncensored window onto the war in nearly three months.
WhatsApp still needs circumvention tools and the filtering layer stays active, running on Chinese deep-packet-inspection hardware that lets the security state switch access on and off region by region. Pezeshkian does not hold that switch alone. He can turn the public internet back on; he cannot dismantle the plumbing underneath it.
Pezeshkian's writ runs through the presidency and the foreign ministry, while the IRGC's budget and command run through the Supreme Leader's office, not parliament. That divide is why a presidential order could restore service yet leave the censorship architecture intact. The same days that Pezeshkian asserted authority over the network, Ali Shamkhani, a voice for the security council, was publicly calling the deal his foreign minister is negotiating a fantasy. The counter-reading treats the restoration as a negotiating optic aimed at Washington and at a restive public, reversible the moment the security state chooses.
A reconnected population can now read the talks its government is running, which narrows the government's monopoly on what Iranians know about their own war.
