Active Incident
Confirmed: continued VPN/social media crackdown
Russia · December 29, 2023 · 371 days
OONI detected censorship pattern in Russia. Continued VPN/social media crackdown. Anomaly rate: 100.0%
Evidence
100%
Anomaly Rate
518,132
Measurements
95%
Confidence
What This Means
100% of 518,132 network tests from Russia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 97+ percentage point difference strongly indicates intentional blocking.
How We Detected This
Data Sourceooni
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO median F1 0.87, honest across 127 countries)
Confidence Score95% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeDecember 29, 2023
Corroborating Evidence (889)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference889 records
block
"Ongoing censorship regime"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.98
Jan 3, 2025
View source →block
"Ongoing censorship regime"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.98
Jan 2, 2025
View source →block
"Ongoing censorship regime"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.99
Jan 1, 2025
View source →block
"Continued VPN/social media crackdown"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.97
Dec 31, 2024
View source →interference
"Web connectivity anomalies detected. 732 measurements with 97.3% anomaly rate."— OONI report
Signal value: 0.97
Dec 31, 2024
View source →+ 884 more OONI records
What we cannot say
- Who caused it — measurement data alone does not attribute this to any government, ISP, or other actor.
- Intent — anomalous or unreachable measurements indicate interference, not a stated motive or a deliberate-vs-incidental determination.
- Which networks — no specific ASN/ISP is identified for this incident.
- The mechanism — we cannot state whether this was DNS tampering, TLS/SNI reset, an HTTP blockpage, throttling, or an infrastructure outage.
- Sub-national scope — measurement is aggregated at the country level; we cannot localize to a province, city, or network segment.
- Independent corroboration — this rests on a single source; treat it as a single-source signal, not a multi-source confirmation.
Cite This Incident
Voidly Research. (2023). Confirmed: continued VPN/social media crackdown [RU-2023-0005]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2023-0005