Developer builds tool to distinguish Russian internet censorship from genuine outages

A developer has launched shutdown.fyi, an open tracker that monitors 38 services across 8 carriers and 85 Russian regions to differentiate between government censorship and actual service outages. The tool works by running identical network probes every five minutes from servers both inside Russia and in Helsinki, Finland, comparing results at each step — DNS, TCP, TLS, and HTTP. When a service fails only from the Russian side, the tool identifies the specific layer at which blocking occurs, such as TLS filtering used against YouTube or IP-level blocking applied to Telegram and WhatsApp. Incident detection is layered separately from access measurement, drawing on complaint data, OONI measurements, IODA traffic data, and BGP visibility, with baselines calibrated by time of day to avoid false anomalies. The project also addresses edge cases, such as anti-bot systems on Russian bank servers that mimic censorship patterns by rejecting connections from datacenter IP ranges.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.


Discussion (0)
Log in to join the discussion and vote.
Log in