Active Incident
Confirmed: sustained censorship in Saudi Arabia (2026-03)
Saudi Arabia · March 10, 2026 · 20 days
OONI detected 19 days of elevated network interference averaging 65.9% anomaly rate.
Evidence
66%
Anomaly Rate
19
Measurements
77%
Confidence
What This Means
66% of 19 network tests from Saudi Arabia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 63+ 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 Score77% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeMarch 10, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (19)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference19 records
blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 2/4 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
Mar 30, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 3/4 measurements anomalous (75.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.75
Mar 27, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 4/6 measurements anomalous (66.7%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.67
Mar 27, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 5/7 measurements anomalous (71.4%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.71
Mar 26, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 7/9 measurements anomalous (77.8%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.78
Mar 26, 2026
View source →+ 14 more OONI records
Affected Services (1)
WhatsApp
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 Saudi Arabia (2026-03) [SA-2026-0135]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/SA-2026-0135