- Russia Roskomnadzor has intensified internet blocks across the country
- Google would have received at least 47 orders for requests to return so far
- Cloudflare subnets have also been temporarily blocked, causing large-scale disturbances of the main websites
Internet users in Russia have suffered from a new wave of online disturbances in recent times, with VPN applications and a main DNS servers supplier being targets.
From March 12, 2025, the body of Russia Censur, Roskomnadzor, would have struck Google with at least 47 elimination orders for some of the best VPN applications from Son Google Play Store.
A few days later, on March 20, the Cloudflare subnets were also temporarily blocked. This causes large -scale breakdowns in several Russian regions, with many popular websites that become dark. Some VPN services have also experienced connectivity problems due to the blocking of the DNS.
Digital rights experts across the country now fear that this is just the start of new blocks.
An increasingly limited internet
Roskomnadzor’s struggle against VPN applications is nothing new, but the extent of Russia VPN blocking efforts continues to intensify.
Thus, while nearly 200 VPNs are already blocked across the country, Roskomnadzor presented new withdrawal orders to Google.
A Russian journalist has counted 47 new requests since March 12, with people like HidemyNetVPN, Proxy Shield VPN and secure VPN among the targets. It is not yet clear if Google has already respected such orders at the time of writing.
This new wave of deleting VPN applications from Google Play Store follows the same Modus Operandi which led Apple to kill around 60 VPN applications of its App Store in Russia between July and September, which brought the total to 98 unavailable applications in the official store of the Grand Giant of Technology.
The ordinances seem to have been issued under a law applied in March of last year, which criminalizes the propagation of information on the means of bypassing the restrictions on the Internet – VPN included.
Website failures have been observed throughout Russia this week, regulators attributing them to problems with foreign servers. Observers have said that problems could be linked to the movements of the Russian government to block the services of Cloudflare https://t.co/bd0gu5g2c1March 20, 2025
Russia’s latest Crusade against VPN services came at the same time as Cloudflare subnets (a group of more than 500,000 IP addresses in the network) were also blocked in the eastern part of the country, from Urals to Primorye.
About 1.5 million IP addresses have been affected – a technical expert from the Russian Russian Digital Rights Group Roskomsvoboda in Techradar told Techradar. The tastes of the sites of Tiktok, Steam, Twitch, Epic Games, Deepseek, Duolingo and Mobile Operator were all inaccessible without VPN.
“The VPN services have also encountered problems because they often have their own management infrastructure linked to Cloudflare,” Roskomsvoboda told Techradar, noting that Warp VPN, which is developed by Cloudflare, has also stopped working.
Commenting on a Russian news agency, Roskomnadzor said that managers “will carry out the planned technical checks to use the infrastructure of foreign servers by Russian services and telecommunications operators”.
Although the incident has been resolved, Roskomsvoboda experts warn that the long -term plan could completely block Cloudflare like Iran.
“Judging by the magnitude of these” exercises “, it can happen very soon,” said the expert in Techradar, explaining that all mobile applications and online services based on Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN) could soon work to work.
We contacted Cloudflare for comments, but still awaits an answer at the time of publication.
