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Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year
- loopback_device 7mo 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
- neurotixz 7mo agoLikely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unable-to-access-the-open-internet/ 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).
- user3939382 7mo ago[flagged]
- blitzar 7mo agoI 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.
- pavlov 7mo ago"Government censorship of websites is good because it reduces Cloudflare usage." What a take... Only on HN.
- user3939382 7mo agoYeah corporate censorship where your constitutional rights don’t apply is so much better.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoBut 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.
- conception 7mo agoCorrect. 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.
- cataphract 7mo agoYou can celebrate the outcome even if you disagree with the means or the motivations.
- dmix 7mo agoThe 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.
- libertine 7mo agoHow is it the same outcome?
- throw-the-towel 7mo agoNot 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.
- dragonwriter 7mo agoState censorship is a different kind of centralization.
- ogurechny 7mo agoHere'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.
- mrweasel 7mo agoThat's Roskomnadzor doing this, not Cloudflare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskomnadzor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskomnadzor
- egorfine 7mo agoCan 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.
- jonwinstanley 7mo agoWhat leads you to think they don’t care?
- tokai 7mo agoIf 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 https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read
- an_ko 7mo agoI 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.
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoIt'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.
- TitaRusell 7mo agoIt doesn't matter what people think it only matters how people act. The Russian ability to suffer in silence is legendary.
- 7mo ago
- tananaev 7mo agoRussia 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.
- _fat_santa 7mo agoI 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.
- proxysna 7mo agoLook into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
- bbminner 7mo agoTo 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.
- konart 7mo agoI 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.
- ivankra 7mo agoVPNs 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-internet-censorship/ https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
- ogurechny 7mo agoShould 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.
- tzury 7mo agoI 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 https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w
- miohtama 7mo agoRussia testing whitelisted only Internet today https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20 https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20
- robotnikman 7mo agoMaybe its just me, but it feels like there has been a lot less ransomware attacks since the Ukraine/Russia war started as well.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agoa 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.
- orbital-decay 7mo agoIt's more complicated than that, the entire former soviet union area was (and is) a huge cybercrime outsourcing market. There are tons of little groups specializing on certain things and selling their services to others. Most notorious "Russian" or "Ukrainian" groups are just visible parts of transnational networks, and depend on the services of others in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Baltics etc. In 2022 the supply chain got partially severed for ransomware and CC fraud in particular, however the black market still functions despite the war.
- viktoresku 7mo agoIn 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.