Russia blocked Discord

As of 8th October 2024, OONI data suggests that Russia started blocking access to Discord – a social networking platform based on text and audio chats for thematic discussions. Recent data suggests that the block remains ongoing. Interestingly, Türkiye also started blocking access to Discord on the same day.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of discord.com on more than 100 networks in Russia between 9th September 2024 to 29th October 2024.

As is evident, the testing of discord.com previously showed that the website was accessible in Russia, and mainly started presenting anomalies from 8th October 2024 onwards. The fact that most measurements thereafter continued to present anomalies provides a signal of Discord blocking.

Overall, most of the anomalous measurements from the testing of discord.com result in connection timeout errors after the first write operation during the TLS handshake, suggesting TLS level interference. This is consistent with the tendency of Russian censors to implement blocks in a more centralized way using DPI equipment that we documented in our latest report on media censorship in Russia.

If you are in Russia, you can test Discord and contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.