Russia blocked Bluesky

As of 11th April 2026, OONI data suggests that Russia blocked access to the social networking site, Bluesky.

Even though Bluesky (bsky.app) had been whitelisted from censorship a month earlier on 10th March 2026, the domain was added to Russia’s blocking registry on 11th April 2026, which correlates with the date of the first blocking signals visible in OONI data. And while the registry specifies that Roskomnadzor (Russia’s internet censorship agency) ordered the unblocking of Bluesky two days later (on 13th April 2026), OONI data suggests that the block remains ongoing on multiple networks in Russia.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of Bluesky (bsky.app) on 567 ASes in Russia between 22nd March 2026 to 22nd April 2026.

As is evident from the above chart, the majority of OONI measurements presented anomalies from 11th April 2026 onwards, suggesting that access to Bluesky (bsky.app) was blocked on that day and that the block remains ongoing on most tested networks in Russia.

Some of the measurements are annotated as “confirmed blocked” (annotated in red in the above chart), pertaining to instances when Internet Service Providers (ISPs) implemented DNS based censorship by returning IPs associated with censorship (such as 188.186.154.79, which hosts a block page) as part of DNS resolution. Such IPs are included in OONI’s blocking fingerprint database, enabling the automatic detection and confirmation of blocks. OONI data shows that the blocking of Bluesky is automatically confirmed on a few networks where censorship-related IPs (such as 188.186.146.208) are returned as part of DNS resolution.

Most measurements though suggest that access to Bluesky is primarily blocked by means of TLS interference on tested networks in Russia. Even though TCP connections to resolved IPs are successful, OONI data shows the timing out of the TLS session in most cases, while in others it shows the injection of a RST packet right after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake. This is consistent with how internet censorship is known to be implemented in Russia.

Beyond Bluesky, Russia is also blocking other major social media platforms, including Twitter/X, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as instant messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal, in addition to numerous independent news media outlets.

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