Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year

Posted by secondary_op 15 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by tananaev 14 hours ago

Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

Comment by _fat_santa 13 hours ago

I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.

Comment by tananaev 13 hours ago

I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.

Comment by wildylion 7 hours ago

I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)

Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.

Comment by sega_sai 12 hours ago

I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.

Comment by proxysna 13 hours ago

Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.

Comment by bbminner 13 hours ago

To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.

Comment by wildylion 7 hours ago

Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.

(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).

Comment by konart 11 hours ago

I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.

But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.

Comment by pixl97 13 hours ago

Iron curtain is coming back up.

Comment by TitaRusell 10 hours ago

On a positive note Russia is now the heart of digital piracy. They aren't in a mood to go after piracy groups.

Comment by DANmode 10 hours ago

Now? lol

Comment by iberator 9 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dang 6 hours ago

Nationalistic flamewar is not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of nation. Personal attacks aren't allowed either. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.

I'm sure you have good reason to feel the way you do, but please, no more of this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places as well, and we've already warned you once. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Comment by tryauuum 6 hours ago

Maybe you should redirect your hate towards the thing you can influence -- your own government who supposedly "lets too many fake refugees in".

Comment by elvin_d 9 hours ago

I feel your take will be taken down soon as it’s not the place for such discussion.

Just food for thought: what makes you to feel so entitled to judge people place of living? You know how we are not choosing where to be born and our mobility is restricted a lot of times? Is your separation for man and women comes from religion or other bias to categorize them?

Comment by iberator 8 hours ago

Russia is our enemy. Simple as that. It's bizarre to allow those people in the west (everybody suddenly is a refugee which is fake) .

Comment by wildylion 7 hours ago

This is the literal job of state security. Besides, most of those $#@$###s get in not by pretending they've been persecuted, but simply because they already have deep cover and hold passports of other countries.

And I sincerely hope that you will never have to know what it's like to flee your own country, first hand. Peace.

Comment by johnisgood 7 hours ago

The Russian government or the Russian people?

Comment by netsharc 8 hours ago

Oh look at you, how easy for you to demand of others that they put themselves in danger before you deem them worthy of protection. "You must have proof you've been arrested by Putin's police before we let you in here!". So they must risk the chance of immediate imprisonment in a freezing Siberian dungeon before you open your generous doors...

And graduates working for the Belarussian state, why is that acceptable and not considered as "conspiring with the war criminals" in your eyes? What other barriers are there that you have in your mind we don't know about, for someone who's worked as expected, and fled the country afterwards?

Comment by gridder 6 hours ago

Survivorship bias

Comment by wildylion 7 hours ago

Fuck you. I have many people here (many of them queer) who had to leave everything and become forced emigres or asylum seekers.

Have a bit of compassion, would ya?

My childhood crush is in Ukraine (I mean, he's Ukrainian), my dear friend (Ukrainian) had to leave everything and seek refuge in NL. My friends (Russian) are under a constant threat of getting imprisoned for 10+ years because they still help support queer and trans people in Russia.

Compared to them I feel very privileged, because I was able to GTFO on my own. But if you think that all Russian citizens must be deported, you're either a troll or a madman. Besides, this is exactly what, for example, Stalin did to Chechens, or think about what the USA did to the Japanese.

Did it help someone? No. Did it ruin millions of lives? You fucking guess.

upd: made it all clearer, and sorry for all the profanity

Comment by Esn024 10 hours ago

>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.

The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).

The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).

Comment by bojan 13 hours ago

That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.

Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.

Comment by nasretdinov 9 hours ago

I think VK is being blocked in some Western countries because it allowed pirated content, not because Russia blocked it :)

Comment by betaby 13 hours ago

VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.

Comment by Modified3019 13 hours ago

> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.

Comment by ekropotin 13 hours ago

Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.

Comment by esafak 13 hours ago

Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.

Comment by Terr_ 11 hours ago

That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.

I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."

Comment by itintheory 10 hours ago

> stenography

I think you mean steganography[0]. Stenography is shorthand, used for transcription.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Comment by wildylion 7 hours ago

That'll eventually get detected and put a massive target on the back of anybody dumb enough to use it. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Comment by adgjlsfhk1 13 hours ago

oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service

Comment by mandeepj 12 hours ago

VPNs didn't help?

Comment by moralestapia 13 hours ago

What do they use, instead?

It's not like they don't want any videos online.

Comment by the_mitsuhiko 13 hours ago

Rutube, VK.

Comment by flexagoon 12 hours ago

> What do they use, instead?

a VPN

Comment by sourcegrift 13 hours ago

> youtube is slow

Maybe they're using Windows Phones?

Comment by neurotixz 14 hours ago

Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...

In a nutshell:

Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Comment by ivankra 13 hours ago

VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.

"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]

[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...

Comment by tzury 13 hours ago

I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region

1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w

Comment by viktoresku 7 hours ago

In addition to the obvious growth in popularity of VPNs, there are two other subtle points:

1. Many Russian IP addresses are now registered to foreign offshore companies to avoid confiscation in the next package of EU sanctions. Being Russian, they were registered through RIPE, which created a risk. The same IP which was Russian a year ago, now can be listed as Madlovian or Magnolian remaining physically in Russia.

2. Cloudflare is a biased internet: the most traffic-heavy sites using Cloudflare are porn sites. That is, we can only draw conclusions here about changes in the structure of porn content consumption in Russia. High-traffic western websites censored in Russia - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ... - are not on Cloudflare anyway and their blockade does not contribute to this chart.

Comment by loopback_device 14 hours ago

> Traffic shifts seen in some networks/locations due to phased integration of new IP geolocation provider

There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was

Comment by robotnikman 10 hours ago

Maybe its just me, but it feels like there has been a lot less ransomware attacks since the Ukraine/Russia war started as well.

Comment by red-iron-pine 9 hours ago

a solid number of propaganda ("marketing") and malware gangs operated out of Ukraine, or other parts of Eastern Europe.

the war definitely changed those flows and targets; e.g. they now flood reddit with pro-Ukranian posts.

most of Russian agit-prop now flows out of "marketing" contractors in India, Pakistan, or Nigeria.

Comment by miohtama 11 hours ago

Russia testing whitelisted only Internet today

https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20

Comment by ogurechny 13 hours ago

Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.

Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.

I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.

Comment by egorfine 14 hours ago

Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care?

Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.

Comment by ivan_gammel 14 hours ago

Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making. It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).

Comment by blell 10 hours ago

The blocking of cloudflare in Spain shows that citizens of “democratic” states have no agency either.

Comment by ivan_gammel 10 hours ago

It is different. It’s just not a sensitive issue - you cannot win elections having fixing this as central part of your platform. In authoritarian states you cannot win elections, period.

Comment by jonwinstanley 14 hours ago

What leads you to think they don’t care?

Comment by tokai 14 hours ago

If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]

[0] https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read

Comment by orbital-decay 13 hours ago

I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.

Comment by pixl97 13 hours ago

Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.

The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.

Comment by orbital-decay 12 hours ago

Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.

Comment by an_ko 13 hours ago

I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.

Comment by justsomehnguy 13 hours ago

> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.

Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.

Comment by thinkingtoilet 13 hours ago

It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.

Comment by TitaRusell 10 hours ago

It doesn't matter what people think it only matters how people act. The Russian ability to suffer in silence is legendary.

Comment by flexagoon 12 hours ago

People who do care use a VPN and don't get counted as Russian traffic

Comment by egorfine 12 hours ago

Ahhh so that completely invalidates my hypothesis. I stand corrected.

Comment by user3939382 14 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by pavlov 14 hours ago

"Government censorship of websites is good because it reduces Cloudflare usage."

What a take... Only on HN.

Comment by ogurechny 13 hours ago

Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.

Comment by user3939382 14 hours ago

Yeah corporate censorship where your constitutional rights don’t apply is so much better.

Comment by ceejayoz 14 hours ago

But this isn't corporate censorship.

This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.

Comment by conception 13 hours ago

Correct. As there is nothing stopping the electorate from passing laws and electing officials to change anything about how Cloudflare works.

Of course they may not, but the option is there unlike autocratic government censorship.

Comment by cataphract 13 hours ago

You can celebrate the outcome even if you disagree with the means or the motivations.

Comment by throw-the-towel 13 hours ago

Not to disrespect you personally, but as someone originally from Russia I'd argue the "cure" of state censorship is worse than the disease of centralisation.

Comment by dragonwriter 13 hours ago

State censorship is a different kind of centralization.

Comment by dmix 13 hours ago

The outcome here is still centralized control, which is why people don't like Cloudflare eating the internet. The Russian government doing it instead is the same outcome.

Comment by libertine 10 hours ago

How is it the same outcome?

Comment by mrweasel 14 hours ago

That's Roskomnadzor doing this, not Cloudflare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskomnadzor

Comment by blitzar 14 hours ago

I suspect it has as much to do with the government of russia blocking and banning vast swaths of the internet not cloudflare randomly blocking 40% of russian traffic.