voidly
Active Incident

Confirmed: censorship detected in Russia

Russia · May 5, 2026 · 23 hours

Evidence

90%
Anomaly Rate
16
Measurements
86%
Confidence

What This Means

90% of 16 network tests from Russia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 87+ 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 Score86% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeMay 5, 2026

Corroborating Evidence (16)

Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.

OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference16 records
blocking
"OONI signal: 651/792 measurements anomalous (82.2%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.82
May 5, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 261/319 measurements anomalous (81.8%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.82
May 5, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI telegram: 254/290 measurements anomalous (87.6%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.88
May 5, 2026
View source →
tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 262/293 measurements anomalous (89.4%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.89
May 5, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI signal: 791/916 measurements anomalous (86.4%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.86
May 5, 2026
View source →
+ 11 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: censorship detected in Russia [RU-2026-2914]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2026-2914

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