New Wave of Website Blocks: Nearly 15,000 Entries Added, Surfshark VPN Not Working
Last week, experts from Roskomsvoboda noticed a significant surge in website blocks in Russia, with almost 15,000 new entries added to the registry of banned sites. Analysts say this level of activity hasn’t been seen since the mass blockings of 2018 and 2021. Additionally, the popular VPN service Surfshark has stopped working in Russia, and Roskomnadzor has reminded the public that it restricts services that violate Russian law.
15,000 Websites Blocked
According to Roskomsvoboda representatives, nearly 14,800 online resources were blocked in Russia from December 5 to December 11. A significant portion of these extrajudicial blocking requests came from an unnamed government agency, which human rights advocates suspect is the Prosecutor General’s Office. For comparison, throughout 2022, between 1,500 and 7,000 resources were blocked weekly, averaging about 4,900.
Last week, 2,100 resources (14% of the total) were blocked by decisions from this unnamed agency. “Presumably, it’s the Prosecutor General’s Office, because it suddenly disappeared from our data exports,” explained Roskomsvoboda press secretary Natalia Malysheva to journalists.
The report notes that mentions of the Prosecutor General’s Office and details of its blocking decisions stopped appearing in Roskomsvoboda’s monitoring system in November 2022. In December, Roskomnadzor published a draft order on regulation.gov.ru that would allow information about the Prosecutor General’s decisions to remain undisclosed.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has the authority to block a wide range of information, from details about the military operation in Ukraine (deemed false in Russia) to offers for selling fake diplomas. Roskomsvoboda reports that there is no abnormal dominance of any single category in the structure of the blocks. For example, the Federal Tax Service, responsible for most extrajudicial blocks in 2022 (31%), accounted for 12% of access restrictions last week. Judicial blocks made up 60% of the total from December 5, compared to 35% throughout the year.
Karen Kazaryan, CEO of the Internet Research Institute, told journalists that recently, website accessibility in Russia hasn’t noticeably worsened, which may indicate synchronization between the blocked sites registry and the filtering lists sent to TSPU (technical means of countering threats). He suggested the reason could be purely formal—“the end of the year is approaching, and it’s time for reports.” Kazaryan also noted that access is often blocked to sites that would otherwise go unnoticed: “The logic of the blocks doesn’t always match the scale of the threats.”
Surfshark VPN
Yesterday, users discovered that the Surfshark VPN service had stopped working in Russia: desktop and mobile apps (Android, iOS) as well as the Chrome browser extension are all down. Users report being unable to connect to servers in any country, and the app itself only launches intermittently.
According to Habr, the issue is widespread: the service is unavailable on MTS, Tele2, Yota, and MegaFon networks, as well as for some Beeline subscribers. Russian users with wired connections are also experiencing partial service restrictions.
In response to numerous complaints, Surfshark’s official Twitter account advised users to contact support and provide more details about the issues. However, the company admitted that it currently has no information about the cause of the outage.
It now appears that Surfshark has indeed been blocked in Russia. In response to media inquiries about the Surfshark block, Roskomnadzor representatives stated that the agency regularly updates the list of VPNs operating in Russia and restricts those that violate Russian law.
“According to the Law on Communications, tools for bypassing blocks on illegal content are considered a threat. Their use leads to continued access to banned information and resources, creating conditions for illegal activities, including the distribution of drugs, child pornography, extremism, and incitement to suicide,” Roskomnadzor explained.