Bets on a total internet blackout in Iran before year-end fall for unclear reasons

Traders have grown more doubtful that Iran will suffer a total internet blackout before the end of the year. Expectations fell from a toss-up a day earlier to unlikely. The reason for the move is unclear, and no sourced event has been found that explains it or the earlier swings.

The outcome is defined narrowly. Cloudflare Radar's chart of Iran's total traffic must fall to 1.0% or less of its four-week maximum for at least six consecutive hourly readings, with the first reading coming before the year ends. A slowdown, a shutdown reported elsewhere, or a decline measured against a different baseline would not count.

Expectations have been choppy over the past week. They mostly stayed in the unlikely range, with brief spikes. One of them, on Nov. 2, briefly pushed expectations well above a toss-up before fading. On Tuesday traders were still closer to a toss-up, then grew more skeptical through the evening, and they have held at unlikely since early Wednesday.

The background shows why traders take the possibility seriously. Cloudflare reported that Iran's international connectivity began recovering on May 26 after an 88-day shutdown that began Feb. 28. By May 27, traffic had returned to 40% of its pre-outage level, and Cloudflare later said HTTP bytes settled around 59%. Those figures do not show whether the six-hour, 1%-of-maximum test was met.

More recently, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani acknowledged on Oct. 13 that authorities had deliberately slowed the internet under wartime conditions, VOA reported. On Oct. 21, an Iranian outlet reported an order to cut international access if war resumed, but the purported directive was not published or independently verified. A deputy communications minister had earlier said renewed war or unrest could bring another shutdown, while stressing that he did not make that decision.

For now, the independent monitor Blackout Map reports no disruption, with 124 of 126 monitored hosts reachable. Its measurements are not the Cloudflare series that decides the outcome. The Radar page was reachable, but its chart values could not be retrieved, so current readings against the threshold could not be checked.

What comes next depends on events that have no set date. Renewed conflict or an Iranian decision to cut access could change connectivity, but no such decision or event has been identified.