voidly
Active Incident

Confirmed: censorship detected in Russia

Russia · August 1, 2026 · 23 hours

Evidence

98%
Anomaly Rate
16
Measurements
89%
Confidence

What This Means

98% of 16 network tests from Russia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 95+ 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 Score89% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeAugust 1, 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: 449/537 measurements anomalous (83.6%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.84
Aug 1, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 302/367 measurements anomalous (82.3%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.82
Aug 1, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI telegram: 296/350 measurements anomalous (84.6%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.85
Aug 1, 2026
View source →
tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 333/340 measurements anomalous (97.9%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.98
Aug 1, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI signal: 513/609 measurements anomalous (84.2%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.84
Aug 1, 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-2026-2990]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2026-2990

Related

Related incidents