Users across Russia began reporting mass disruptions to VPN services on August 4, 2026. The outages may stem from restrictions on IP addresses belonging to large hosting providers whose infrastructure VPN services rely on to route traffic.
According to the Telegram channel Exploit, servers belonging to more than 20 popular censorship-circumvention services were affected by the restrictions. Many users faced an inability to connect to VPNs or experienced unstable connections throughout the day.
Hosting Providers Affected
Preliminary reports indicate the problems are linked to blocks on entire subnets of major hosting providers, where many VPN services rent servers and host nodes, meaning the restrictions hit several independent services at once. Some VPN providers have notified customers they are shifting users to backup infrastructure, while others say the restrictions are limited and do not affect all their servers.
Regulatory Context
RBC reported the previous day that Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is discussing tighter controls over so-called "masked" VPN services with hosting providers, potentially asking them to identify VPN-linked IP addresses and report them to the regulator. Similar incidents occurred in late May, affecting VPN and Telegram's MTProto proxies, and in January, when some services lost access to servers used to bypass mobile internet restrictions.
