Saudi Arabia just blocked Tinder

Today, Saudi Arabia blocked access to Tinder – the world’s most popular dating app. We were alerted of this block by our new Censorship Alert System, which is currently an internal prototype that we’re testing (but hope to publicly release over the next year).

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of Tinder (tinder.com) on 5 networks in Saudi Arabia over the past month.

As is evident from the above chart, all measurements from the OONI Probe testing of Tinder (tinder.com) in Saudi Arabia over the past month showed that the site was previously accessible on tested networks (the anomalous measurement visible on 28th July 2026 was collected at 23:57 UTC, which is 02:57 in Saudi Arabia’s local time on 29th July 2026). Starting from 29th July 2026, most measurements from the testing of tinder.com presented anomalies, providing a signal of blocking.

A per-network breakdown of OONI measurement coverage shows that the anomalies are only present on one tested network: Etihad Etisalat (AS35819), widely known as Mobily. This is illustrated through the following chart.

Based on available OONI data, access to Tinder only appears to be blocked on Etihad Etisalat (AS35819) so far. The measurements collected from this network suggest that access to tinder.com is blocked by means of TLS interference, because all anomalous measurements show interference at the TLS level.

Specifically, OONI measurements show the injection of a RST packet after the ClientHello during the TLS handshake, which usually suggests the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. The TLS handshake is interrupted by these connection resets even though DNS resolution is consistent and TCP connections to the resolved IP addresses are successful, thereby reducing the likelihood that the failures are caused by transient network issues. In addition, many other websites were accessible on Etihad Etisalad (AS35819) on 29th July 2026, further reducing the likelihood of false positives and supporting the conclusion that Tinder was selectively blocked.

Tinder is also blocked in other countries, such as Iran, Tanzania, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

We thank OONI Probe users in Saudi Arabia and around the world for contributing measurements.