Active Incident
Confirmed: sustained censorship in Russia (2026-03)
Russia · March 1, 2026 · 29 days
OONI detected 404 days of elevated network interference averaging 88.0% anomaly rate.
Evidence
88%
Anomaly Rate
404
Measurements
80%
Confidence
What This Means
88% of 404 network tests from Russia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 85+ 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 Score80% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeMarch 1, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (404)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference404 records
blocking
"OONI signal: 835/962 measurements anomalous (86.8%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.87
Mar 30, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 338/375 measurements anomalous (90.1%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.90
Mar 30, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 245/356 measurements anomalous (68.8%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.69
Mar 30, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 313/329 measurements anomalous (95.1%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.95
Mar 30, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI signal: 1050/1213 measurements anomalous (86.6%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.87
Mar 30, 2026
View source →+ 399 more OONI records
Affected Services (4)
SignalTelegramTorWhatsApp
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. (2026). Confirmed: sustained censorship in Russia (2026-03) [RU-2026-0433]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2026-0433