Active Incident
Confirmed: censorship detected in United Arab Emirates
United Arab Emirates · July 26, 2026 · Ongoing
Evidence
100%
Anomaly Rate
6
Measurements
90%
Confidence
What This Means
100% of 6 network tests from United Arab Emirates 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 mean F1 0.711, honest across 131 countries)
Confidence Score90% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeJuly 26, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (6)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference6 records
tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 3/3 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Jul 26, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 5/5 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Jul 26, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI facebook_messenger: 1/2 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
Jul 26, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 1/2 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
Jul 26, 2026
View source →middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 1/2 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
Jul 26, 2026
View source →+ 1 more OONI records
Affected Services (2)
Facebook MessengerTor
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.
- A confirmed duration — we report the observation window, not a verified start/stop of any block.
- 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: censorship detected in United Arab Emirates [AE-2026-1450]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/AE-2026-1450
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