Active Incident
Confirmed: censorship detected in Russia
Russia · August 3, 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
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO median F1 0.87, honest across 127 countries)
Confidence Score90% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeAugust 3, 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: 566/657 measurements anomalous (86.1%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.86
Aug 3, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI whatsapp: 347/415 measurements anomalous (83.6%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.84
Aug 3, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 344/392 measurements anomalous (87.8%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.88
Aug 3, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 375/379 measurements anomalous (98.9%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.99
Aug 3, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI signal: 598/709 measurements anomalous (84.3%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.84
Aug 3, 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.
- 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 Russia [RU-2026-2995]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/RU-2026-2995
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