- Amnezia VPN claims Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor is actively attacking its infrastructure with DDoS
- The attacks began in late May, leaving Amnezia Free and Premium users unable to switch servers or establish stable connections.
- Other circumvention services like BlancVPN have also reported outages,
Russia’s federal media censor, Roskomnadzor, is reportedly taking a much more hostile approach to internet censorship.
Instead of simply blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), the agency is now accused of launching active distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to completely disable VPN systems.
The accusation comes from Amnezia VPN, a popular service that has been virtually down for several days. The developers stated that the attacks made it impossible for users to switch between servers, severely disrupting their Free and Premium tiers.
According to a report by independent news outlet Meduza, Amnezia VPN users began experiencing severe connection issues and app instability in late May. The service’s developers soon identified the cause and pointed the finger directly at Russian state censors.
“For the first time we can say that Roskomnadzor has not only started blocking VPN servers, but has also actively attacked our infrastructure,” the developers announced. The agency has not commented on the allegations.
A coordinated cyber offensive
The developers attributed the widespread outages to “an unprecedented DDoS attack amid the targeted blocking of a wide variety of Amnezia VPN IP addresses.”
While Amnezia representatives first reported on the targeted attack on June 1, they also noted that several other anonymous VPN services were “experiencing availability issues” around the same time.
“An unprecedented DDoS attack”
AmneziaVPN
Although the team initially estimated that restoring service would take only a few hours, the magnitude of the outage has delayed the recovery process.
On June 4, the developers stated that they were working to “find the most effective way to restore stable operation of services” and emphasized that “work continues 24 hours a day.” Amnezia VPN has promised to compensate its Premium users for downtime.
The growing battle for Internet freedom in Russia
This is not an isolated incident. Amnezia VPN had already experienced outages in mid-May, which it attributed to “massive blocks related to the actions of censors.”
Around the same time, Russian users also reported widespread problems with the MTProto cryptographic protocol, which Telegram uses to bypass blocking.
Another popular service, BlancVPN, also suffered major outages in late May and early June, although it reported on June 4 that a large portion of its service had been restored.
A BlancVPN representative told Meduza that the censorship landscape is rapidly deteriorating. They noted that there have been more lockdowns in 2026 than in 2025, and more in 2025 than in 2024.
As Roskomnadzor continues to hone its technical capabilities, VPN providers are forced to continually develop new solutions. This latest supposed shift from passive blocking to active DDoS attacks indicates that the battle over digital privacy in Russia is entering a new phase.
