voidly
Active Incident

Confirmed: censorship detected in Russia

Russia · August 2, 2026 · Ongoing

Evidence

99%
Anomaly Rate
16
Measurements
90%
Confidence

What This Means

99% of 16 network tests from Russia failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 96+ percentage point difference strongly indicates intentional blocking.

How We Detected This

Data Sourceooni + censoredplanet
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO mean F1 0.711, honest across 131 countries)
Confidence Score90% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeAugust 2, 2026

Corroborating Evidence (41)

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

OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference16 records
blocking
"OONI signal: 476/558 measurements anomalous (85.3%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.85
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 323/382 measurements anomalous (84.6%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.85
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI telegram: 312/356 measurements anomalous (87.6%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.88
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 347/356 measurements anomalous (97.5%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.97
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
blocking
"OONI signal: 536/653 measurements anomalous (82.1%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.82
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
+ 11 more OONI records
Censored PlanetUniversity of Michigan research25 records
dns-blocking
"DNS blocking detected: 43/43 probes anomalous (100.0%) for bbc.com"Censored Planet report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
dns-blocking
"DNS blocking detected: 18/18 probes anomalous (100.0%) for chat.openai.com"Censored Planet report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
dns-blocking
"DNS blocking detected: 16/16 probes anomalous (100.0%) for chatgpt.com"Censored Planet report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
dns-blocking
"DNS blocking detected: 15/15 probes anomalous (100.0%) for claude.ai"Censored Planet report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
dns-blocking
"DNS blocking detected: 42/42 probes anomalous (100.0%) for facebook.com"Censored Planet report
Signal value: 1.00
Aug 2, 2026
View source →
+ 20 more Censored Planet 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.
  • 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.

Cite This Incident

Voidly Research. (2026). Confirmed: censorship detected in Russia [RU-2026-2992]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2026-2992

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