throttlingStarting June 9, 2025, Russian internet service providers began throttling access to websites and services protected by Cloudflare, effectively rendering them inaccessible to users in the country.
The throttling restricts downloads to just 16 KB of any web asset, severely disrupting most Cloudflare-backed sites.
Cloudflare confirmed the disruption but stated it has not received formal communication from Russian authorities. The company attributes the action to broader efforts by Russia to purge Western tech influence and block tools that enable users to circumvent censorship. “As the throttling is being applied by local ISPs, the action is outside of Cloudflare’s control,” the company said in a statement.
The crackdown also affects infrastructure from Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and OVH, all of which are commonly used by Russians to host private VPNs and anti-censorship services like Psiphon. By degrading access to these providers, the Russian government is undermining digital tools used to bypass state restrictions without having to target them individually.
Cloudflare reports that Russian ISPs, including Rostelecom, Megafon, Vimpelcom, MTS, and MGTS, are using techniques such as packet injection and blocking, impacting all modern web protocols, including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Meanwhile, digital rights group Roskomsvoboda notes widespread mobile internet disruptions across over 30 regions in Russia, extending even to areas far from the Ukraine conflict zone.
