Egypt blocked independent media outlet Zawia3

On 16th February 2025, Egypt started blocking access to Zawia3, one of the few independent news media websites that were still accessible in the country.

Egypt is known for implementing pervasive media censorship with more than 100 news media URLs being blocked in the country since 2017. Zawia3 was one of the few independent investigative media outlets in exile that remained accessible in Egypt up until this year.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of zawia3.com in Egypt between 3rd February 2025 to 4th April 2025.

As is evident from the chart, OONI measurements from the testing of zawia3.com show that the website was accessible until 15th February 2025. From 16th February 2025 onwards, we see a spike of anomalies which persisted thereafter, providing a signal of intentional censorship. The timing of the anomalies correlates with Zawia3 reporting their website becoming inaccessible for Egyptian users on 15th February 2025.

While OONI measurement coverage for zawia3.com is relatively limited, we can confidently say that zawia3.com was blocked on at least one network: Egyptian Telecom, AS8452. Many of the measurements from this network show signs of TLS interference. Specifically, OONI data shows that the connection is reset after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake.

On 1st March 2025, Zawia3 reported that their second domain (zawia3.net) was also blocked on 27th February by Egyptian ISPs

If you are in Egypt, you can contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.