Russia Freezes Entire Hosting Networks to Block VPN Traffic, Investigation Finds
An independent investigation has shown that Russian network operators are not blocking individual websites or IP addresses but are instead freezing entire autonomous systems used by popular hosting providers.
The researcher began testing after noticing inconsistent VPN performance on a Hetzner server located in Finland. AmneziaWG connections worked normally while Reality-based connections would open and then hang indefinitely. Further tests with static files hosted directly by Hetzner, OVH, Vultr and Scaleway confirmed that the issue affected whole networks rather than a single server.
Using a public list of test files, the author scanned 435 endpoints belonging to 154 companies. From within Russia, 87 percent of the files downloaded successfully while the remainder stalled after approximately 16 KB. The affected endpoints clustered into 14 autonomous systems that are throttled in full:
- OVH (France, Canada, USA) – 12 of 12 points frozen
- GTHost – 11 of 11 points frozen
- HostPapa – 7 of 7 points frozen
- DigitalOcean – 3 of 3 points frozen
- M247 – 3 of 3 points frozen
- Hetzner (including US and Singapore locations) – all points frozen
- Vultr, Scaleway, BuyVM, Clouvider and others – all points frozen
Packet captures showed that the mechanism counts TCP packets rather than bytes. After roughly 25 packets the connection is silently throttled in both directions, causing the session to hang without an explicit reset. UDP traffic used by WireGuard and AmneziaWG is not affected.
The pattern matches the behavior of Russia’s TSPU filtering infrastructure, which receives centralized rules from Roskomnadzor. The same throttling threshold was previously documented by Cloudflare in June 2025 and attributed to major Russian operators.
The researcher recommends checking the autonomous system of any server via whois or ipinfo before relying on it for VPN use and suggests maintaining backup servers in unaffected networks such as HostHatch, FlokiNET or Psychz.
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