Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Iron curtain is coming back up.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.
Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.
VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.
> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
VPNs didn't help?
Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.
Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.
That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use stenography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.
"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region
> Traffic shifts seen in some networks/locations due to phased integration of new IP geolocation provider
There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care?
Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.
Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making.
It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).
What leads you to think they don’t care?
If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]
I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.
Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.
The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.
I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.
> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.
Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.
It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.
People who do care use a VPN and don't get counted as Russian traffic
Ahhh so that completely invalidates my hypothesis. I stand corrected.
[flagged]
"Government censorship of websites is good because it reduces Cloudflare usage."
What a take... Only on HN.
Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.
Yeah corporate censorship where your constitutional rights don’t apply is so much better.
But this isn't corporate censorship.
This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.
Correct. As there is nothing stopping the electorate from passing laws and electing officials to change anything about how Cloudflare works.
Of course they may not, but the option is there unlike autocratic government censorship.
You can celebrate the outcome even if you disagree with the means or the motivations.
Not to disrespect you personally, but as someone originally from Russia I'd argue the "cure" of state censorship is worse than the disease of centralisation.
State censorship is a different kind of centralization.
The outcome here is still centralized control, which is why people don't like Cloudflare eating the internet. The Russian government doing it instead is the same outcome.
I suspect it has as much to do with the government of russia blocking and banning vast swaths of the internet not cloudflare randomly blocking 40% of russian traffic.
Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Iron curtain is coming back up.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.
Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.
VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.
> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
VPNs didn't help?
Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.
Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.
That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use stenography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service
What do they use, instead?
It's not like they don't want any videos online.
> What do they use, instead?
a VPN
Rutube, VK.
> youtube is slow
Maybe they're using Windows Phones?
Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...
In a nutshell:
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.
"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]
[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region
1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w
Russia testing whitelisted only Internet today
https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20
> Traffic shifts seen in some networks/locations due to phased integration of new IP geolocation provider
There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care?
Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.
Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making. It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).
What leads you to think they don’t care?
If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]
[0] https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read
I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.
Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.
The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.
I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.
> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.
Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.
It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.
People who do care use a VPN and don't get counted as Russian traffic
Ahhh so that completely invalidates my hypothesis. I stand corrected.
[flagged]
"Government censorship of websites is good because it reduces Cloudflare usage."
What a take... Only on HN.
Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.
Yeah corporate censorship where your constitutional rights don’t apply is so much better.
But this isn't corporate censorship.
This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.
Correct. As there is nothing stopping the electorate from passing laws and electing officials to change anything about how Cloudflare works.
Of course they may not, but the option is there unlike autocratic government censorship.
You can celebrate the outcome even if you disagree with the means or the motivations.
Not to disrespect you personally, but as someone originally from Russia I'd argue the "cure" of state censorship is worse than the disease of centralisation.
State censorship is a different kind of centralization.
The outcome here is still centralized control, which is why people don't like Cloudflare eating the internet. The Russian government doing it instead is the same outcome.
That's Roskomnadzor doing this, not Cloudflare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskomnadzor
I suspect it has as much to do with the government of russia blocking and banning vast swaths of the internet not cloudflare randomly blocking 40% of russian traffic.