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Internet Starts Coming Back In Iran After Months-Long Blackout (bbc.com) 185

Posted by BeauHD from the partially-restored dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Internet access has started to be restored in Iran after being cut off almost three months ago, the country's first vice-president has said. "The first step toward free and regulated access to cyberspace has been taken," Mohammad Reza Aref wrote on X on Tuesday. Internet monitoring groups Netblocks and Kentik reported "partial" restoration around 13:00 GMT, though the latter warned most networks were still down.

The Iranian government cut internet access following the launch of US and Israeli attacks on February 28. Officials suggested the aim was to prevent surveillance, espionage and cyber-attacks. It is one of the longest-running national internet shutdowns ever recorded worldwide. A content creator from Tehran told the BBC that he had been able to connect to the internet using his home WiFi on Tuesday. "The main point is, some of my income will come back," he said.

Netblocks said it was unclear whether the internet return would be sustained, and told the BBC it was consistent with what it had seen when previous blackouts were lifted -- where restoration could take hours. "Access is not universally back to its original state, with some regional variation," said the global internet tracker's research director Isik Mater on Tuesday. She added that there were signs of "more extensive filtering" than prior to January -- when a similar blackout was imposed during the regime's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests -- "including additional restrictions to messaging apps like WhatsApp."
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Internet Starts Coming Back In Iran After Months-Long Blackout More

Internet Starts Coming Back In Iran After Months-Long Blackout

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  • free and regulated? (Score:4, Informative)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @06:02PM (#66161586)

    Regulared? Yes. Free? Absolutely not.

    • Nice typo.

    • Good development for regular Iranians. Maybe help deter going after the sea bed cables.

  • Thanks to Trump (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @06:26PM (#66161612)
    The Iranian government has fully consolidated their power. It's not just that he gave them cover to go after their opposition, by starting a useless War so that he could replace Obama's plan with everything but worse he completely neutered any opposition to the Iranian government.

    When you're at attacked everybody just gathers around the existing power structures. That's what happened in America with 9/11. All of the sudden douche nozzles like George Bush Jr and Rudy Giuliani were considered great people. Both men were on the way out the door politically when 9/11 hit and had very successful careers because of the attack.

    The exact same thing happened with the Iranian government. They had serious opposition because they can't feed their people and they were going to have to start giving real concessions and maybe even some semblance of democracy. Trump shit all over that with his staggering incompetence.

    There's a thing called a chesterton's fence where you don't take down the fence unless you understand why it was put up. There is a damn good reason why even the stupidest fucking administration's imaginable did not attack Iran.

    And now the reasons why are plain for anyone to see. Meanwhile Iran has now demonstrated complete control of the strait of Hormuz meaning they can shut down 1/5 of the world's traffic anytime they want. And we can do fuck all about it because Trump squandered basically all the Goodwill in the world for the United States so he could threaten Greenland and Canada.

    Son, are you winning?

    I am so fucking tired of winning.

    • Stop it with the bullshit. You'd be making excuses for Iran even if Israel and the US hunted down and killed every member of the IRGC. Iran is fucked. Their proxies are fucked.

    • Re:Thanks to Trump (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:15AM (#66162382) Homepage Journal

      They had serious opposition because they can't feed their people and they were going to have to start giving real concessions and maybe even some semblance of democracy.

      Yeah, their slaughtering of possibly tens of thousands of protesters was clearly a sign of upcoming concessions.

      Dictators lose when they make concessions. They stay in power when they double down. That's the hard lesson of a hundred years or so of dipshits becoming big boss by military coup or revolution. Those who put absolutely every penny into propaganda and oppression tend to hang on to power the longest.

      And given what the IRGC and the regime have done to the Iranian people and how much they're loved in the rest of the world, staying in power is literally a life-or-death matter for them. The day the regime falls, we'll see all the Ayatollahs and minions hanging from trees.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Trump shit all over that with his staggering incompetence.

      That's one way to look at it. Another is that this is what Russia wants.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by torkus ( 1133985 )

      > Winning
      You would like losing a LOT less.

      I'm no highly respected scholar on the middle east like you clearly are but a nuclear-armed terrorist-state doesn't tickle my happy places.

      Nuclear weapons would give them actual /control/ of the Strait of Hormuz vs the temporary interdiction while they ensure the rest of their middle-eastern 'brothers' want nothing to do with them.

      Trump is good at making enemies, but they still need him for better or worse.
      Iran is making lots of enemies, none of which want or nee

      • I'm no highly respected scholar on the middle east like you clearly are but a nuclear-armed terrorist-state doesn't tickle my happy places.

        OK, but enough about the US and Israel. Iran is not and never has been a nuclear power. The US nuked Japan twice just because it would be a shame not to use both bombs.

        • That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 2

          • That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped.

            You're right, we did it for science, because we are the inspiration for the Nazis and we didn't want to let the Axis be the only monsters in the war.

    • Please tell us where the 40,000 dead Iranian protesters fit into this Trump-caused catastrophe...

  • Iran internet shutdown to quiet their own people (Score:5, Informative)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @06:32PM (#66161628)
    Iran shutdown the internet for almost the entirety of January, well before the US started dropping bombs. Iran's people were holding massive protests against Iran's government which followed with the government's mass indiscriminate killing of protesters and their family members, including notably their Olympic wrestling team athlete. Iran's claim that they shut down the internet due to US hacking is an outright lie, they simply did not want Iranian protesters to support to the US's position. The women's national football team were granted asylum in Australia but were forced to return to Iran under threat of their families being killed as well. With the cutting off of the internet the videos of killings, dead bodies, and those begging and pleading with the US to intervene stopped coming out. We will see how much Iran has beaten down their people and if any resistance still remains with the internet now slowly being restored.

    • and those begging and pleading with the US to intervene stopped coming out.

      Going to need a citation for that one.

      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        I have no special knowledge of the situation, I just used a search engine.

    • Why do you think Trump bragged about arming these 'protesters' with firearms months before while Bessent bragged about running a currency crash scheme?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      We will see how much Iran has beaten down their people and if any resistance still remains with the internet now slowly being restored.

      We likely won't.

      They made it very clear that they are monitoring and restricting Internet access, and the fact that even during an active war they went on to sentence and hang protesters makes it abundantly clear what will happen to anyone sharing information with the world that they'd rather not see on the world news.

  • Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @06:47PM (#66161660)

    The Iranian government cut internet access following the launch of US and Israeli attacks on February 28. Officials suggested the aim was to prevent surveillance, espionage and cyber-attacks.

    This is tantamount to misinformation. The regime cut the Internet on January 8th [wikipedia.org]. It was *never* turned back on for the general public. Iran started allowing some country-wide intranet only, with heavy censorship and *no* outbound communication (except for regime figures). There has been no way to communicate with people in Iran anytime since except (a) Starlink (illegal, extremely risky, and subject to jamming) (b) outbound telephone calls (monitored).

    Because it started January 8th, it is clear the initial purpose is very different than this states. The protests themselves started in late December. The internet blackout corresponds with nothing else but the regime crackdown in which they murdered tens of thousands of Iranian civilians. The obvious main purpose has been to keep Iranians from sharing about the atrocities.

    Is the war related? Of course. It has become only more important as Iran has sought to seize a diplomatic high-ground (or at least equivalency) to maintain full narrative control. And it is true there is an intelligence aspect as well, but more than cyber attacks (how is downing your *own* Internet a win there?) the concern is likely that the Iranian people have been happy to share information to help target the regime, as they did during the previous 12 Day War.

    It is malpractice to quote "officials" - if those are indeed "Iranian officials" - and then offer their uncontested view, when they are the ones who blacked out the Internet specifically to be able to offer an uncontested view.

  • Uptick in bot activity (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I noticed an uptick in bot activity and was wondering where it came from, guess I know now.

  • but it *is* cheaper than carpet bombing the whole jungle to take out one tent, at least.

    Sigh...

  • Whatever will young people do if there's nothing to scroll?

  • Months?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Months?! I thought he said he'd solve it in a day, oh wait... that was years ago and about the Russia Ukraine war. Back on topic: Months!? I thought he said no new wars and then that the new war would be over in a week?!

    • Keep up. The war ended on day one. Each day was a new war that ended before it began. The wars are completely over. We're in a fighting cease fire. That's something completely different.

      Trump has ended over 60 wars at this point. Give that man a prize!

  • Lol at the people who thought the US could win a war by just bombing everything.

  • The irony of this shit bag announcing this reduction in censorship on X is certainly something. I wonder if any of his citizens will be allowed to see it.

  • I am tracking what is hapenning since January here: https://state-of-iranblackout.... [state-of-i...r.security]

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