Iran's internet reached only about 40 per cent of pre-war traffic by 28 May, the monitor NetBlocks reported, three days after President Masoud Pezeshkian's 25 May restoration order ended the longest national shutdown on record.1 NetBlocks is the UK-based watchdog that measures connectivity disruptions worldwide. In practice most Iranians remain effectively offline, and those who do reconnect stay on virtual private networks, the tools that route traffic abroad to evade state filtering, expecting the next shutdown.
Mohammad Sarafraz, a member of Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace, confirmed that Chinese-built deep-packet-inspection hardware for a permanent, switchable blackout has been imported and installed.2 Deep-packet inspection lets the state read and block traffic by content rather than crudely severing the line.
Iranians are back online inside a system that can be cut by a single decision, with the Chinese equipment already wired in. The 40 per cent figure is the visible change; the switchable hardware behind it is the durable one. Iran has compressed the timeline China used in Xinjiang, where a ten-month isolation in 2009 was followed by embedded inspection hardware, installing the architecture during the war rather than after it. The next blackout need not be an emergency dragged out for weeks. It can be a switch, and VPN use stays heavy because ordinary users assume the next cut is a matter of when, not whether.3
