Iran reinstates some internet access but restrictions remain for most

Not all data centres are back online while internet protocols remain blocked, restricted or ‘whitelisted’.

Tehran, Iran – Authorities in Iran have reinstated some internet access three months after taking the country offline at the start of the war with the United States and Israel, but restrictions remain in place for most people.

The Iranian government said last week that it had started a process to bring internet access back to a pre-war level, which was already very restricted as Iran was at the time still coming off an earlier 20-day shutdown imposed during deadly nationwide protests in January.

Last week’s move ended more than 2,000 hours of near-total internet shutdown in the country of 90 million people, the longest-ever nationwide blackout in the world.

But according to numerous user reports, local media accounts and expert analysis, Iranians’ free access to the global internet is far from restored.

Access to millions of web pages remains blocked by the state, and almost all global services and apps such as YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Waze are closed off and are not under consideration for reinstatement.

Mobile, wireless and landline connections are slow and patchy, to varying degrees, while many local applications and services regularly malfunction or fail to load.

Most people are forced into a black market for access to the internet, which has proven lucrative for those selling virtual private networks (VPNs) or other circumvention methods, often through affiliations with the state.

Those connections have now become cheaper after the authorities restored some internet bandwidth, but demand for VPNs has skyrocketed, and people remain exposed to scammers and malware while navigating the market.

Meanwhile, even after the partial reopening, Iranian authorities continue to impose several complex layers of restrictions that have effectively turned full internet access into a privilege that very few people authorised by the state can enjoy.

An expert who spoke on background with Al Jazeera said many foreign IP addresses are currently not fully blocked but rather placed in a restricted “grey” middle state.

In practice, while those connections are allowed to begin, the traffic and the volume of data packets that the authorities have permitted people to use are extremely limited, causing poor connectivity.

If the connection is “whitelisted” to proceed by state authorities, however, there will be fewer or no restrictions.

That has prompted more criticism against Iran’s relatively moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian,