After two months offline, Morteza finally managed to reconnect for a few minutes and send a message to a group of old friends.
“Hi guys, do you know any VPN that actually works?” he wrote. “I’m locked out of my hearing-aid account. I can’t update it.”
The message captured something many Iranians have been trying to explain for months: the country’s internet crisis is no longer just about Instagram, Telegram or access to foreign news websites. The internet has become woven into nearly every aspect of daily life: from work and banking to transportation, education and healthcare.
Iran’s latest shutdown, which began on February 28 and continues in various forms, has become one of the longest nationwide internet disruptions in the world.
Even global tech companies have begun to feel its effects. Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, recently reported that the average daily users of its apps fell from 3.58 billion to 3.56 billion in the first quarter of the year, partly because of internet disruptions in Iran.
The decline was small by Meta standards but striking nonetheless: Iran’s blackout had become large enough to leave visible marks on the usage charts of some of the world’s biggest technology platforms.
The whitelist
During wars, outages caused by attacks on infrastructure are not unusual. But in Iran’s case, the authorities themselves ordered and implemented the restrictions while simultaneously insisting that no real “internet shutdown” had occurred.
Officials instead describe the measures as restrictions on “foreign platforms” imposed because of wartime conditions.
Rasool Jalili, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, argued that when foreign media speak about an internet shutdown, they really mean access to Instagram and Telegram. He went further, placing those platforms in the same category as American fighter jets and missiles.
The comparison reflects a broader shift in how parts of the Iranian establishment increasingly view the internet: not as infrastructure, but as a threat to governance and security.
The same argument is often echoed abroad by commentators close to the government. Mohammad Marandi, for example, argued in response to an Al Jazeera report that because some domestic applications and services remained functional, describing the situation as an “internet blackout” was misleading.
Technically, internet filtering usually means blocking specific websites or services from a global network—a system based on blacklists.
But what Iran is now moving toward goes further than blocking Instagram, X or Telegram. Increasingly, access itself is being reorganized around approved users and approved services through a system marketed as “Internet Pro.”
Internet as privilege
The idea emerged publicly after the ceasefire alongside official talk of domestic governance of foreign platforms.
The government presented the plan—reportedly approved by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council—as a temporary measure designed to reduce pressure on businesses during wartime.
In practice, it creates different layers of internet access based on profession, identity and official approval.
A doctor’s package may allow access to YouTube while keeping Instagram blocked. A businessman’s package may permit Instagram but not other services. The result is a more formalized version of what critics inside Iran have long described as “class-based internet.”
The prolonged restrictions have inflicted severe damage on businesses already weakened by inflation and war. But they have also created new economic opportunities.
Pursuit of workarounds
VPNs sold in Iran vary widely. Some are commercial products, others are homemade “configurations” that function only through specific servers and routes, while some reportedly rely indirectly on systems such as Starlink.
For users, however, they all mean the same thing: paying increasingly large sums for fragments of connection to the outside world.
Reports suggest VPN prices have multiplied several times since the beginning of the war, though free anti-censorship tools developed by independent developers occasionally disrupt the market and drive prices down.
But here is the contradiction: if unrestricted internet access is truly considered a security threat, why does that same access become available to approved groups through money, permits or connections?
Independent investigative journalist Yashar Soltani has argued that the “Internet Pro” system is tied partly to the financial interests of major telecom operators and networks linked to powerful state institutions.
Whether or not all aspects of those claims withstand scrutiny, one reality is already visible inside Iran: alongside the shutdown itself, a market has emerged for selling different levels of digital access.
The result is a growing divide between those who remain connected and those effectively cut off from the outside world.
At the same time as restricting access to the global internet, the Islamic Republic has increasingly redefined connectivity not as a public right but as a controlled privilege—one that can be priced, restricted and distributed according to political and economic priorities.
In Iran today, internet access is becoming not just a tool of communication, but a commodity and an instrument of control.
