Azerbaijan blocked Twitter/X

Between 8th to 10th October 2024, access to Twitter/X was restricted in Azerbaijan. OONI data collected from Azerbaijan shows that ISPs started blocking access to Twitter/X on 8th October 2024, and that the block was lifted by 10th October 2024.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of twitter.com and x.com in Azerbaijan between 5th October 2024 to 12th October 2024.

As is evident, the testing of both twitter.com and x.com started to present anomalies on 8th October 2024, while both domains were previously found accessible on tested networks in Azerbaijan. These anomalies – combined with reports – suggest that access to Twitter/X’s web service was blocked.

Between 5th October 2024 to 12th October 2024, Twitter/X was tested on 6 ASes in Azerbaijan and presented anomalies on at least 5 networks – all of which started on 8th October 2024 – providing a strong signal of blocking. As of 10th October 2024, access to Twitter appears to have been unblocked in Azerbaijan on all tested networks.

Most of the anomalous measurements from the testing of x.com show connection timeouts after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake, suggesting TLS level interference. This is consistent with how we have previously found internet censorship to be implemented in Azerbaijan. However, the TLS handshake for twitter.com is successful in most of the collected measurements. This suggests that SNI filtering only targeted the x.com domain, but not twitter.com.

This was not the first time that Azerbaijan blocked access to social media. In previous years, Azerbaijan blocked access to TikTok in September 2022 and September 2023 amid border clashes with Armenia.

If you are in Azerbaijan, you can test social media and contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.