Persian and Tesnim agencies reported that Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkiyan instructed the Ministry of Communication of the Islamic Republic to restore international internet access in the country.
The head of the administration of the Iranian government, Ali Ahmedniya, confirmed this development and noted that all cabinet members voted for the restoration of the internet at the meeting on May 25.
ISNA wrote that Pezeşkiyan's decree will be implemented within the next 24 hours.
According to the data of the monitoring project NetBlocks, the internet was not available in Iran for 87 days as of May 25. The project pointed out that this situation is the longest nationwide internet outage recorded in any country during the history of observation.
Access to the global network in Iran was lost on the first day of the war with the United States and Israel that began on February 28. However, internet access was stopped in the country before the military operations.
The mass protests organized due to the worsening economic situation justified this situation. The internet outage at that time lasted from January 8 to January 17.
According to Euronews data, a multi-layered system has been formed in Iran during the current outage, where authorities, certain experts and companies maintain partial access to foreign services, and ordinary users have to resort to VPN services.
In particular, some of the high-ranking officials and journalists included in private lists receive a "white internet" that does not include restrictions and traffic filtering.
The second level is the Internet Pro or "fixed business internet" that is accessible to registered companies, journalists, lawyers, teachers, scientists and doctors.
This level includes restricting some international platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and the social network X.
Ordinary users who do not fall into these categories have to buy a VPN. According to Euronews data, Internet Pro is priced at about 40 thousand divisions per gigabyte (about $0.22), while commercial VPNs cost more than 12 times for the same volume, with about 500 thousand divisions (about $2.7).
According to the assessment of Abbas Ashtiani, head of the blockchain commission of the national IT organization, the damage to Iran's digital economy in the first 50 days of the outage was about 1 billion dollars.
Aştiani stated that the daily losses could be between 30 and 35 million dollars. Small sellers working on Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram and e-commerce companies suffered the most from the process.