- Roskomnadzor de Russia has intensified Internet blocks throughout the country
- According to the reports, Google has received at least 47 orders for elimination application so far
- Cloudflare subnet also blocked fear for the same time, causing large -scale interruptions of the main websites
Internet users in Russia have been suffering a new wave of interruptions online lately, with VPN applications and an important DNS server provider are the objectives.
As of March 12, 2025, Russia’s censure agency, Roskomnadzor, has hit Google with at least 47 elimination orders of some of the best VPN applications of its Google Play store.
A few days later, on March 20, Cloudflare’s subnets were also temporarily blocked. This causes large -scale interruptions in multiple Russian regions, with many darkened popular websites. Some VPN services also experienced connectivity problems due to DNS blocking.
Digital rights experts throughout the country now fear that it is just the beginning of more blocks.
An increasingly restricted internet
Roskomnadzor’s fight against VPN applications is nothing new, but the scale of Russia’s VPN blocking efforts continues to intensify.
So, while almost 200 VPN are already blocked throughout the country, Roskomnadzor has presented Google some new elimination orders.
A Russian journalist has counted 47 new applications since March 12, with people such as Hidmynetvpn, Proxy Shield VPN and Secure VPN among the objectives. It is not yet clear if Google has already fulfilled such orders at the time of writing.
This new wave of VPN applications of Google Play Store applications follows the same modus operandi that has led Apple to kill around 60 VPN applications of its App Store in Russia between July and September, which takes the total to 98 applications not available in the official Big Tech Giant store.
The orders seem to have been issued under a law applied in March last year, which criminalizes the propagation of information on ways to avoid Internet restrictions, including VPNs.
The website interruptions were observed throughout Russia this week, and regulators attributed them to problems with foreign servers. The observers said that the problems could be linked to the movements of the Russian government to block Cloudflare services https://t.co/bd0GU5G2C1March 20, 2025
Russia’s last crusade against VPN services occurred at the same time that Cloudflare’s subnet (a group of more than 500k IP addresses within the network) also blocked in the eastern part of the country, from the Urals to the premory.
Around 1.5 million IP addresses were affected, a technical expert for the Russian digital rights defense group Roskomsvoboda to Techradar. The tastes of Tiktok, Steam, Twitch, Epic Games, Deepseek, Duolingo and mobile operators sites were inaccessible without a VPN.
“VPN services have also experienced problems, since they often have their own management infrastructure linked to Cloudflare,” Roskomsvoboda told Techradar, noting that Warp VPN, developed by Cloudflare, also stopped working.
When commenting on a Russian news agency, Roskomnadzor said that officials “will carry out scheduled technical controls on the use of foreign servers infrastructure for Russian services and telecommunications operators.”
While the incident has been resolved, experts in Roskomsvoboda warn that the long -term plan may be completely blocking cloudflare as Iran did.
“Judging by the scale of these ‘exercises’, this can happen very soon,” the expert told Techradar, explaining that all mobile applications and online services that depend on Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN) could soon stop working.
We contacted Cloudflare to comment, but we are still waiting for an answer to the time of publication.
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