This requires context. Bank Sepah is the IRGC’s primary financial institution, designated under international sanctions for decades as the Revolutionary Guard’s banking arm. Bank Melli is Iran’s largest state-owned commercial bank, the institution through which ordinary Iranians hold savings, receive salaries, and conduct daily transactions. The regime locked both simultaneously, the military bank and the people’s bank, overnight, during the most intense phase of a war that is burning through munitions, fuel, and foreign reserves at a rate no Iranian budget was designed to sustain. The “technical upgrade” explanation has not been confirmed by any Central Bank of Iran official statement accessible to international media. No timeline for restoration has been published. No independent verification of the technical claim exists. What exists is an overnight lockout of the two banks most critical to war financing and citizen liquidity, imposed twelve days into a conflict where the rial trades at 1.5 million per dollar, inflation runs between 40 and 60%, electricity shortfalls hit 14,000 megawatts, and water rationing is active in multiple provinces.
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