The regime has insisted the website will remain blocked to all users.
Facebook was outlawed in Iran after youths used it to organize anti-regime demonstrations during the 2009 presidential elections.
Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, a member of the working group on ‘criminal content on the Internet’, told the state-run ISNA news agency (Sept 22) that there were no plans to lift the Facebook ban again.
The reason Facebook had become accessible for several hours last week was due to a ‘technical problem’, and not because rulers had agreed to remove filtering on Facebook and Twitter.
A regime technical expert told ISNA: “These two networks used various ranges of IP addresses to give access to users throughout the world. Using this system disrupted our filtering for a few hours, but this problem and possibility of accessing these websites was solved and filtering was resumed.”
Many Iranians have been using VPN software to connect to servers outside Iran and gain access to blocked websites. But the Ministry of Communications said it has now updated its technology to disable this software, and using it was a crime within the regime.