Internet Begins to Return in Iran After Three Months of Shutdown

After than After 2,000 hours of government blackouts, there were signs on Tuesday that Iran’s internet is coming back on — at least for the most part.

More than 90 million Iranian citizens lived there without internet due to the high volume of 2026, in the middle of the blackout that started on February 28, when Israel and the United States invaded the countryand previous internet shutdowns followed widespread protests in January. The reconnection appears to have been ordered by Iranian authorities – but it is likely to be temporary.

Although some Iranian networks appeared to be connecting to the world’s Internet on Tuesday, analysts warned that the level of access was very low despite the partial restoration that Tehran allowed in late January and the entire month of February—and was the lowest level of Iranian traffic around the world since December 2025. Color, NetBlocksand Cloudflare began writing about the partial restoration of communications in Iran starting at noon local time on Tuesday.

“We’re seeing a lot of Iranian traffic,” said Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert at the Internet rights group Miaan Group. “Some providers have come back online, but it’s too late to tell what will happen. After the January protests, some providers were brought back online, but about 50 percent of traffic in the country was down.”

Doug Madory, director of internet research at Kentik, says, “We don’t see much change in mobile networks.” Instead, he says, some fixed-line providers appear to be restoring their services, including the Telecommunication Company of Iran’s fiber-optic service around Tehran. to show “great gain.”

In early January, the Iranian government completely shut down Internet access as the government killed thousands of protesters who took to the streets to demand control of the country’s economy. The government also severed communications in late February when the United States and Israel went to war in Iran—leaving millions of Iranians unable to contact their families, destroying the local economy, and preventing news and videos about the war from entering and exiting the country. The limited reconnection of Internet services on Tuesday comes as the US government continues to negotiate with Iran on an end to the war.

Over the past decade, the Iranian government has undertaken a major task of controlling communications and monitoring the country’s content as well as creating a national intranet that aims to replace the world wide web. This includes the householder, control-weight tech like search engines, messaging apps, and climbing platforms. In fact, digital control systems are often used as tools of abuse rather than tools of precision. It is so not well known whether this is the result of technological failure, political instability, or both.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council appears to have ordered the internet shut down in late February when the war with the US began. A group created by the current president of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian, known as the Special Center for Planning and Controlling the World’s Cyberspace, said that it had ordered the restoration on Monday, although the move caused a legal challenge in Iran’s Supreme Court. However, the Minister of Communications in Iran he said that the agreement should continue according to the plan of the President, and that process is underway restore connection within 24 hours.

“What we are seeing now is an increase in traffic from Iran, but we have to wait and see the results of the war,” Miaan Group’s Rashidi says. “Challenging the president’s order in court, according to the political culture of Iran, was embarrassing for Pezeshkian. So we have to wait and see how this fight will go.”