- Iranian Internet begins to partially recover after 88-day outage
- Still, national traffic remains below 50% of normal levels on Wednesday.
- Digital rights experts warn historic outage far from over
Internet in Iran is slowly recovering after an “almost complete shutdown” imposed on February 28 at the start of the conflict with the United States and Israel.
Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, shared the news on the long-blocked social media platform X. This followed a report on Monday that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had issued an order to reopen international access to the internet.
“In accordance with the mission of the esteemed president and in accordance with the promise of the government, the first step towards free and regulated access to cyberspace has been taken,” Reza Aref wrote on X on Tuesday.
The lifting of restrictions has been confirmed on landline and mobile connections by various internet monitoring organizations, including Cloudflare Radar. However, Iranian Internet experts are not yet ready to rejoice.
Amir Rashidi, director of internet security and digital rights at Miaan Group, warned that “the internet is not connected”, with traffic well below 50% of normal levels. “The volume of disruption on the network is very high,” Rashidi wrote on X on Wednesday.
Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik, echoed that assessment, comparing the partial restoration of the internet to the fluctuating network conditions seen between the first wave of internet restrictions that began on January 8 and the shutdown on February 28.
Speaking to TechRadar, Madory confirmed that over the past day, traffic volume reached approximately 41% of normal levels. “This is also lower than what we observed during the partial restoration between January 27 and February 28,” he added.
Fully restoring the internet will likely be a slow process. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that Iran’s Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi confirmed that the restoration of the Internet would happen gradually.
The Internet shutdown is not over yet
Iranians have been living in digital darkness for 88 consecutive days, marking the longest internet shutdown in the country’s history.
Although the easing of restrictions is an essential development, Rashidi warned that “it is too early to say the shutdown is over,” arguing that the move may just be an attempt to generate “a limited sense of public relief.”
Madory also called the partial restoration of the Internet a “very positive development,” aiming to bring “limited relief” to the Iranian people. “But the country is still a long way from returning to pre-January 8 levels of connectivity,” Madory told TechRadar.
However, residents are wasting no time finding ways to reconnect. Proton VPN, a popular free VPN service, has already seen massive spikes in signups from the country starting Tuesday afternoon.
🇮🇷 Iran Update: Yesterday at 1:10 p.m. GMT we saw the first sign that internet access in Iran was starting to decline, after a 3-month internet outage, with another jump at 5:40 p.m. With internet access still heavily censored, usage of @ProtonVPN in Iran continues to rise this morning. pic.twitter.com/axx9ofaf94May 27, 2026
According to previous reports, Iran is moving towards a permanent whitelist system. In this scenario, that would mean that most of the country’s 90 million citizens would only be able to access a small list of state-approved websites and apps, making using a VPN much more difficult, if not impossible.
Kentik data suggests that limited connectivity had already been restored to a select few, such as government officials, loyalists and some businesses, as early as April.
It remains unclear exactly which platforms are accessible or which connections are completely stable at this point. Speaking to TechRadar, Madory said he doesn’t expect full internet access to return anytime soon.
Limited connections, Madory explains, can cause VPN services and other censorship circumvention tools to fail. “And that can be a goal,” he added.
