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Iran lifts record blackout, 2,093 hours

4 min read

15:43UTC

Iran's president ordered the internet restored after 2,093 hours, the longest national shutdown on record, but NetBlocks confirmed only a partial reopening with filtering still live.

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Key takeaway

Pezeshkian could flip the public internet on but not touch the IRGC hardware that filters it.

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 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.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Since the 2026 Iran war began on 28 February, Iran's government shut down the internet for virtually all ordinary Iranians. Think of it as cutting off mobile and home broadband for 90 million people for nearly three months. The stated reason was to prevent coordination of protests and to stop sensitive military information leaking online. On 25 May, Iran's elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, ordered the internet switched back on. By 26 May, an independent monitoring organisation called NetBlocks confirmed partial restoration. But 'partial' matters: WhatsApp and similar apps still do not work without a special workaround. The reason is that China supplied Iran with powerful filtering technology that sits deep inside the network. The president can turn the public switch on, but he does not control the filtering layer underneath, which the IRGC manages. So the internet came back, but in the same censored form Iran's citizens are used to, plus some additional blocks left in place from the war.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Iran's ability to conduct a 2,093-hour national internet blackout rests on a procurement decision made over several years before the 2026 conflict began.

Iran imported Chinese DPI hardware, specifically Huawei-grade systems capable of reading and blocking encrypted traffic at the network layer, through a programme disclosed publicly by Mohammad Sarafraz, a member of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, on 23 May 2026. That council sits above the presidency in Iran's constitutional order; it reports to the Supreme Leader, not the cabinet.

The second structural cause is the tiered-access system the Supreme National Security Council built on top of the DPI layer: a 'white internet' for senior officials and select journalists, 'Internet Pro' at 40,000 tomans per gigabyte for licensed professionals, and commercial-VPN access at twelve times that rate for the general public.

This pricing architecture means restoring the public tier does not affect the security tier; the IRGC's command communications and Khamenei's office were never in the same network tier as ordinary Iranians.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Pezeshkian's order demonstrates civilian authority over the nominal public internet switch but does not touch the IRGC-controlled DPI layer, drawing a visible boundary between presidential and security-state power inside Iran's wartime structure.
Immediate · Assessed
Risk
The IRGC retains the technical capacity to reverse the partial restoration at regional level without a cabinet order; the diplomatic utility of the gesture to Washington may be extracted before the underlying power contest resolves.
Short term · Assessed
Precedent
A restored Iranian population can now read coverage of the Doha negotiations their own government is conducting, narrowing the 87-day information monopoly the security state held over domestic public opinion about the war.
Medium term · Suggested

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: China's Xinjiang internet shutdown from July 2009 to May 2010 ran for 312 days, ten months, isolating 21 million people in a single province. Beijing used the same centralised-DPI architecture that Iran subsequently acquired. The Xinjiang shutdown was lifted in stages, with voice calls restored before data, and with filtering layers kept active after nominal restoration.

Iran's 2026 blackout reached 2,093 hours, roughly 87 days, across the entire country, a structurally parallel use of the same technology for the same stated purpose: blocking coordination of internal dissent during a security emergency. The post-Xinjiang lesson, documented by the Citizen Lab, is that 'restoration' under this architecture means a return to a filtered internet, not an open one.

Counter-parallel: Myanmar's post-coup internet shutdowns from February 2021 onward used a different enforcement model: Myanmar's military government ordered ISPs to cut connections under direct regulatory threat, without the centralised DPI layer.

When partial restoration occurred in May 2021, it was more complete because there was no state hardware inside the network to maintain selective filtering. Iran's Chinese DPI procurement means the Myanmar counter-parallel does not apply: Pezeshkian cannot execute a Myanmar-style full restoration even if he orders one.

The cumulative economic cost of the blackout exceeded $1bn by the time of partial restoration, per Hasht-e Subh citing aggregated data from Iranian business associations. The Netconf study group's pre-war baseline for Iran's internet-dependent GDP share was roughly 4-5%; at that share, 2,093 hours of near-total shutdown at normal GDP velocity implies a flow cost of around $1.1-1.3bn, consistent with the published estimate.

Partial restoration produces only partial economic recovery. WhatsApp, the primary cross-border business communication channel for Iranian exporters and diaspora remittance flows, remains blocked. The DPI layer's continued operation means financial messaging apps and some banking APIs that use the same encrypted-traffic profiles as WhatsApp also remain intermittently unavailable.

Consensus view: The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School, which has physically reverse-engineered Iran's Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) infrastructure, and Freedom House's Freedom on the Net team both assess that Pezeshkian's 25 May order reveals the limit of civilian writ precisely because the restoration is partial: the Chinese-supplied DPI hardware sits at the layer below any presidential decree and is procured and operated by the IRGC's signals intelligence directorate, not the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology that Pezeshkian controls.

Counter-view: Iran's ISPA (Internet Service Providers Association) and several reformist journalists writing for the Shargh Daily in Tehran argue the partial restoration is more significant than Western monitors acknowledge: the Chinese DPI system requires centralised permission signals to block at the regional level, and Pezeshkian forcing even a partial permission change shows the presidency can override specific regional blocks, even if it cannot disable the hardware.

Shargh commentary frames the move as a deliberate signal to Washington and to Iran's urban professional class that the civilian government is willing to pay a domestic cost for diplomatic optics.

Key tension: Whether the IRGC will accept the partial lift as a bounded concession from the presidency, or whether it will reverse the order once the diplomatic utility (signalling flexibility in Doha talks) has been extracted.

First Reported In

Update #109 · War Powers clock outlasts Congress by a day

Hasht-e Subh· 27 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Iran's wartime internet splits into three tiers

The 87-day internet blackout documented as the longest in modern record is the event Pezeshkian's 25 May order ends, advancing from the prior cost-documentation beat.

Occurred 20 May 2026

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Iran buys China's internet control dial

Chinese DPI hardware installed is why restoration is only partial — Pezeshkian can flip the public switch but not the underlying security-state infrastructure.

Occurred 23 May 2026

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This Event

Iran lifts record blackout, 2,093 hours

The order maps the exact boundary of civilian authority in Iran's wartime state: the president can flip the public switch but not touch the IRGC's filtering hardware beneath it.

Led to

Iran's internet returns at 40%, by design

Pezeshkian's 25 May restoration order was the direct cause of the 28 May partial-recovery measurement; the 40% figure is the outcome of that order.

Occurred 28 May 2026

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Different Perspectives

Office for Budget Responsibility

The OBR's 28 October forecast assumed $82 oil for 2026 and 2027, from market prices for the ten working days to 19 August, and blamed dearer wholesale energy on the war without naming Iran. It expects CPI inflation close to 4% in early 2027 even at that price.

Hengaw, Kurdish rights group

Hengaw reported the 3 November hangings of Amirhossein Maleki and Amirhossein Ebrahimi in Isfahan, saying Ebrahimi was tortured into confessing and that nine of 12 people sentenced to death in the case have now been hanged. Iran's judiciary holds that the defendants killed members of the security forces.

FINTRAC, Canada's financial intelligence unit

FINTRAC worked with the US Treasury on the 6 November designation of eight money services businesses in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. Treasury says the businesses still operate, some under new names, so closing them falls to Ottawa.

Abdul Qadir al-Dakhil, Governor of Nineveh

Al-Dakhil cancelled three Mosul International Airport contracts on 7 November over alleged links to armed groups, after meeting Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in Baghdad. He named no group or company, and said the contracts will go to international companies.

Kuwait

Kuwait condemned the Houthi missile fired towards the Madinah region on 5 November and restated its support for Saudi Arabia, the Qatar News Agency reported. Its state tanker company, Kuwait Oil Tankers Company, is among the Gulf state fleets on Iran's expanded Hormuz list.

Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary

Treasury designated an alleged Chandigarh false-flag network on 4 November and eight Canadian exchangers on 6 November, while State sanctioned alleged MANPADS intermediaries. None of the actions touches an oil buyer; they target the paper, cash and procurement around Iran's trade.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.