voidly
Citizen Lab category·COMT·circumvention

Countries blocking VPNs, Tor, and encrypted messengers

Live data on which governments and ISPs are restricting circumvention tools and encrypted communication.

4
severe-blocking
4
high-blocking
16
countries with data
133
evidence rows
Last updated Apr 26, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC · revalidates every 5 min

Top countries blocking circumvention tools

Ranked by total measured blocking volume in this category.

  • #1
    severe
    100
    15
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #2
    severe
    80
    12
    signal.orgwhatsapp.comtelegram.org
  • #3
    severe
    73
    11
    telegram.orgsignal.orgwhatsapp.com
  • #4
    severe
    73
    11
    telegram.orgsignal.orgwhatsapp.com
  • #5
    high
    67
    10
    telegram.orgsignal.orgwhatsapp.com
  • #6
    high
    60
    9
    telegram.orgsignal.org
  • #7
    high
    60
    9
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #8
    high
    53
    8
    telegram.orgwhatsapp.comsignal.org
  • #9
    medium
    47
    7
    whatsapp.comsignal.orgtelegram.org
  • #10
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #11
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #12
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #13
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #14
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #15
    medium
    40
    6
    whatsapp.comtelegram.orgsignal.org
  • #16
    medium
    33
    5
    telegram.orgsignal.orgwhatsapp.com

How we measure circumvention tools

The COMT category covers anti-censorship tools and encrypted messengers — VPNs, Tor, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. When a regime is escalating censorship, these are usually the first targets, because they are the tools people use to evade everything else.

Voidly correlates network-level measurements (DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP) from OONI, CensoredPlanet, IODA, and our own probe network. Each blocked domain is mapped to a Citizen Lab test-list category, and the topic API filters those measurements to category COMT.

Scoring: within a topic, a country's score is a percentile against the worst country in the same category — so the top-ranked country always scores 100. This avoids cross-topic distortions. Full methodology →

Example domains in this category: signal.org, telegram.org, whatsapp.com, torproject.org

Embed this on your site

Drop this iframe into any page (newsroom, advocacy site, dashboard) — it auto-updates.

<iframe
  src="https://voidly.ai/widget/embed?topic=circumvention"
  width="100%"
  height="500"
  frameborder="0"
  title="Voidly censorship: Circumvention tools">
</iframe>

API access

Free, no auth required, JSON, CC BY 4.0. Cached at the CDN; live every 5 minutes.

curl
curl https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json?topic=circumvention
JavaScript / TypeScript
const res = await fetch(
  'https://api.voidly.ai/data/censorship-index.json?topic=circumvention'
)
const data = await res.json()
console.log(data.countries[0])
Released under CC BY 4.0 · cite as voidly.ai/topics/circumvention