On Tuesday 26 May, Iran began to lift the most protracted state-mandated internet blackout ever imposed on a nation of over 90 million people, restoring a trickle of fixed broadband connectivity after 88 days of isolation. The order came from President Masoud Pezeshkian, yet what returned was not the open web but a heavily controlled channel: mobile internet remained largely severed, and social media platforms such as Instagram, X, and Telegram stayed officially blocked. The shutdown had begun on 28 February, coinciding with the first American and Israeli military strikes, and followed an earlier blanket cut during the mass protests of January. Its partial unwinding was met not with celebration but with a bitter, anxious relief.

From Tehran to the provinces, the human response was a cacophony of joy and indignation. An engineering student named Kian Galvani declared on X that he had “never been so happy in my life to see Telegram notifications,” while others, in messages gathered by the BBC, described the sensation as moving from solitary confinement to the general wing of a prison. Yet beneath the novelty of reconnection lay raw resentment. “I feel kind of stupid that I am happy about such a simple thing,” a 29-year-old tech worker in Tehran told The New York Times. Interviews with Italian media revealed the deep economic devastation: businesses collapsed, freelance work evaporated, and families lost months of income in a country where even ordinary life relies on VPNs to pierce pervasive state filtering.

Viewed from Western monitoring hubs, the restoration looks less like a freeing than a recalibration of repression. Data from the network intelligence firm Kentik, shared with a Jerusalem-based outlet, showed that traffic after the resumption was still well below the levels recorded before the January protests, and even beneath the partial restoration window in late January and February. Researchers cautioned that each previous reconnection after a prolonged blackout in Iran had been accompanied by tighter surveillance and more aggressive filtering. In a development tracked by Italian journalists, the judiciary actively undermined Pezeshkian’s reopening decree by suspending the body charged with internet governance, signalling an unresolved power struggle at the top of the Islamic Republic.

The geopolitics of the blackout are inescapable. While the initial cut was justified as wartime security during the conflict with the United States and Israel, regional analysts in Dubai note that it served equally to smother internal dissent and to sever the population from external information flows. Amir Rashidi, a digital rights researcher based in Italy, told Radio Farda that the “financial, social and psychological costs” were staggering and warned against assuming the crisis had ended. With mobile internet still dark across large areas and the judiciary resisting reform, the prospect of a genuinely open internet in Iran remains remote. The return of some connectivity, as one BBC Persian listener put it, amounts not to liberation but to a transfer within the digital prison.