Starting June 2025, Russian ISPs began throttling access to websites protected by Cloudflare, severely limiting site functionality within the country. This crackdown appears to be part of Russia’s broader effort to eliminate Western technology and censorship circumvention tools like Psiphon and VPN hosting services such as Hetzner and DigitalOcean. #Cloudflare #RussianCensorship
Keypoints
- Russian ISPs started blocking and throttling access to Cloudflare-protected sites in June 2025.
- The throttling restricts downloads to only the first 16 KB of web assets, disrupting site accessibility.
- Cloudflare reports no formal communication from Russian authorities and cannot control the throttling measures.
- Other Western hosting providers like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and OVH are also affected by similar restrictions.
- The measures aim to hinder the use of anti-censorship tools and VPN hosting to bypass Kremlin blocks.