The same IPv6 transition your infrastructure team has been procrastinating on is now being weaponized by governments. On January 8, 2026, Iran's IPv6 address space dropped 98.5% while IPv4 remained intact—a surgical strike against mobile users.
In this episode, we break down:
- Why blocking IPv6 specifically targets mobile users (hint: carrier NAT exhaustion)
- The BGP mechanics of protocol-specific blocking
- "Engineered degradation" vs total blackout—the new censorship playbook
- How Starlink terminals are changing the calculus for authoritarian internet control
- What platform engineers need to know: protocol-specific monitoring, Happy Eyeballs testing, dual-stack resilience
Plus news: Kubernetes 1.35 CSI SA tokens, HashiCorp non-human identity, CoreDNS 1.14.0, OpenTelemetry Slack analysis, AWS Route 53 Global Resolver, and kernel bug hide times.
Links:
- Episode page: https://platformengineering.org/podcasts/00085-iran-ipv6-blackout
- Cloudflare Radar Iran: https://radar.cloudflare.com/ir
- RFC 8305 Happy Eyeballs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8305
