Iran IPv6 Blackout - When Governments Weaponize Protocol Transitions

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