After nearly three weeks of near-total digital silence, connections in Iran are flickering back to life, but only for some and only on the state’s terms. What looks at first glance like a restoration of normality is instead emerging as a controlled reopening that hardwires inequality into who gets to be online.
The result is a country where a minority of officials, security agencies, and favored businesses are regaining access to the global web, while millions remain trapped behind a reinforced national firewall. The blackout may be easing, but the architecture of a two-tier internet is coming into focus.
The anatomy of a 20‑day blackout
The latest shutdown did not come out of nowhere. Iranian authorities have spent years building the technical and legal tools to disconnect the country from the outside world, including a domestic network that can function even when international links are severed. Earlier this month, that system was tested at full scale when internet and telephone access across Iran was cut on Jan. 8, a move widely understood as an attempt to choke off information about a government crackdown on protests and to limit contact with the wider Iran diaspora.
According to accounts gathered from inside the country, the communications blackout coincided with what witnesses have described as a “bloodbath” in which an estimated 5,700 protesters were killed as security forces moved to crush dissent, a toll now being examined by international investigators who are asking whether Can the US and other governments can do more to keep such crackdowns from unfolding in the dark. Reporting on the 2026 Internet blackout in Iran indicates that the plan was reportedly orchestrated by high-level officials Mohammad Amin Aghamiri and Mehdi SeifAbadi, who helped design a system that treats connectivity as a weapon to be aimed at the Iranian people, a strategy that builds on earlier nationwide shutdowns during protests in November 2019 when During that period authorities first demonstrated how quickly they could pull the plug.
A selective return, engineered from the top
Now, as connections slowly reappear, the pattern is anything but random. Nearly three weeks into the shutdown, Farshad Bayan of BBC Persian has reported that Iran’s internet is returning in a staggered way that favors state institutions and key sectors, with Farshad Bay and other journalists documenting how some ministries and banks were among the first to see service restored while ordinary users remained offline. According to sources cited in that reporting, foreign messaging apps are still blocked for most people, while a narrow slice of users with special permissions can reach them, a sign that authorities are using the reopening to refine control over who can connect and under what conditions, a trend that aligns with the broader trajectory of BBC Persian sources.
Officials, for their part, insist that the restoration is primarily a technical challenge. The CEO of Iran’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Company has told reporters that problems affecting access are expected to ease and that services will return on a sustained basis, framing the outages as the result of damage and congestion rather than deliberate policy, even as that same CEO of Iran has overseen a rollout that clearly prioritizes government and security traffic. Independent network monitors back up the idea of a partial, uneven reopening, with NetBlocks reporting that although Iran has restored some international connectivity after roughly 20 days, most websites and platforms remain unreachable and authorities appear to be privileging what they describe as “public security” over economic considerations, a pattern visible in traffic data from Iran itself.
Windows, workarounds, and the people left offline
For ordinary Iranians, the return of connectivity has not been a simple on-off switch. Many are experiencing brief, unexplained windows of access that last minutes or hours before dropping again, a pattern that has allowed people to upload videos of protests and funerals, contact relatives abroad, and share casualty lists before the line goes dead. These intermittent connections have given Many in Iran a widening glimpse of the scale of the government’s violence and the breadth of the protests, even as rights groups caution that they are still working to verify the numbers emerging from these short-lived online Many windows.
In the gaps, people are relying on a patchwork of tools and human networks to stay connected. Farzaneh Badiei, an internet policy analyst who grew up in Iran and now lives in New York, has described how even a small window to the outside world can be enough for activists to coordinate, using VPNs, circumvention apps, and trusted contacts abroad to move information in and out of the country, a process that She says has become more sophisticated with each new Farzaneh Badiei shutdown. Volunteers outside Iran have stepped in too, with Much of the recent connectivity routed through tools like Psiphon that are being actively promoted and configured by technologists abroad to pierce what they describe as an internet iron curtain, a role highlighted in detailed accounts of how Psiphon and similar platforms are keeping at least some channels open.
A deliberate move toward a two‑tier internet
What is emerging from this crisis is not just a temporary security measure but the outline of a permanent restructuring of how Iranians go online. Activists warn that Iran is planning to permanently break from the global internet by routing most traffic through a tightly controlled national network, effectively cutting the population off from the broader world while preserving selective international links for the state, a strategy described as an attempt by Iran to build its own sovereign cyberspace. Separate reporting suggests that Iran’s internet blackout may become permanent in another sense too, with authorities testing a two-tier system in which elites, security agencies, and regime-aligned businesses retain access to the global web while ordinary citizens are confined to domestic services, a model that analysts at Rest of World say would reverse the usual pattern in which governments built networks before their populations went Iran online.
This strategy is not being improvised on the fly. The 2026 Internet blackout in Iran entry notes that the plan was reportedly orchestrated by Mohammad Amin Aghamiri and Mehdi SeifAbadi, who have been central to building the infrastructure and legal framework that allow authorities to toggle connectivity by region, sector, and user group, effectively turning the internet into a tiered privilege rather than a universal utility, a system whose contours are laid out in detail on Mohammad Amin Aghamiri. Analysts who track censorship note that this builds on a long-running effort by Iranian authorities to replace foreign platforms with domestic alternatives, a campaign that began years ago and intensified after November 2019 when Iranian officials tried to push users toward local messaging and social media services and to block foreign alternatives with little luck, a trajectory documented in assessments of how Iranian censorship has evolved.
The economic and political costs of keeping people in the dark
The human rights implications of this controlled reconnection are obvious, but the economic fallout is already severe. Iran’s internet shutdown has cut online business sales by as much as 80%, according to the head of the union of virtual businesses, who warned that many companies are being pushed toward destruction as customers vanish and logistics chains seize up, a stark figure that underscores how deeply e-commerce had become embedded in daily life in Iran. That collapse is happening even as some favored firms regain partial access, reinforcing the sense that connectivity is being used as a lever to reward loyalty and punish dissent, a perception strengthened by reports that the pattern of restoration could reflect a deliberate effort to prioritize government agencies and critical infrastructure while leaving large swaths of the population offline, a conclusion echoed in technical analyses cited by Madory.
