Iran’s long digital night has begun to lift. On Monday, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued an order reopening international internet access, and within hours, according to reports from Tehran, social-media notifications began pinging onto millions of long-silent screens. Monitoring group NetBlocks, based in Britain, confirmed a partial restoration after an 87-day outage that started when the United States launched strikes on 28 February. The sudden reconnection caught many off guard. “I feel as if I’ve been released from prison and I am in shock,” a Tehran resident told Israeli media, while a student, Kian Galvani, wrote on X that he had never been so happy as when he saw his Telegram messages resume.

The relief, however, was layered over economic wreckage. Viewed from Latin America’s business pages, the blackout translated into what Persian-language outlets abroad described as a silent collapse of thousands of enterprises and the overnight unemployment of millions. Rana, a Tehrani in her fifties who works in graphic design, marketing and cultural events, told a Buenos Aires radio correspondent that all four of her professions depended entirely on the internet. “I could not work at all,” she said. “Internet is a necessity in our time.” The digital siege, lasting 88 days according to several regional and diaspora sources, severed not just social ties but the fragile livelihoods of a nation already burdened by sanctions and inflation.

The political calculus behind the shutdown and its partial reversal remains murky. Officials in Tehran, the Argentine report noted, wanted to project a return to normality after what they characterised as 40 days of war and 50 days of threats, and were responding to mounting public criticism of the cut. Haaretz, meanwhile, cited internal government divisions over whether to maintain the block. Whatever the tactical reasoning, the blackout functioned as a nationwide digital repression, forcing Iranians onto a censored, tightly monitored “local internet” that starved them of independent news and contact with the outside world.

Analysts in London caution that the reconnection is both incomplete and fragile. NetBlocks described the restoration as only partial, and Australian media quoted experts warning that Iran has a long way to go before its digital infrastructure returns to anything resembling pre-war function. The fear that the plug might be pulled again is palpable; the same Tehran resident who spoke of release from prison said many fear the respite is temporary. For a country where even in normal times international access was heavily censored, the three-month rupture may leave lasting scars, embedding a deeper mistrust of a state that can cut its citizens off from the world at will.