Belarus restricts access from abroad to some websites ahead of “elections”

In Belarus, on the eve of the presidential «elections», hosting providers have restricted access from abroad to some sites that use cloud hosting for three days.

This is reported by Belsat.

It is noted that the restrictions were introduced by order of the State Operational and Analytical Center, which regulates activities to ensure information protection.

«From 10:00 on January 25 to 23:59 on January 27, 2025, Belarusian hosting providers will restrict access to virtual hosting from outside the Republic of Belarus. These measures are due to threats to information infrastructure facilities and information processed using them», – the message of the Internet provider hoster.by says.

Hoster.by also warns its customers that if they use external services, they need to be prepared for the fact that access to their resources will be limited.

Cloud hosting involves launching a website or application on several servers located in the cloud at the cloud provider's facilities. Often, such services are used by large search engine and social network sites.

It is noted that the majority of sites on the bynet (over 90%) are hosted on virtual hosting.

As the Belarusian portal Zerkalo.io writes, on the morning of January 25, users from Belarus encountered difficulties when using VPN services and individual foreign sites. According to the publication's readers, the outages affected at least six anonymization services.

In November 2024, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko threatened in advance to «disconnect» the Internet if the situation during the 2020 presidential elections «recurs» is repeated.

As Ukrinform reported, early voting in the so-called presidential elections began in Belarus on January 21, and will last until January 25. The main day of «expression of will» is January 26.

To participate in the «elections» The Central Election Commission of Belarus registered five candidates: Alexander Lukashenko, Oleg Gaidukevich, Anna Kanopatska, Alexander Khyzhnyak, and Sergei Syrankov.

The democratic forces of Belarus have repeatedly stated that they will seek non-recognition of these «elections» by the international community. According to human rights activists, the elections in Belarus « no longer fulfill their functions, but are used by the authoritarian government to paint a positive picture of general support and thereby legalize the authoritarian government».

Members of the European Parliament called on EU countries and the international community not to recognize the results of the fake presidential elections in Belarus, where dictator Alexander Lukashenko is expected to «win».

The previous «elections» in the Republic of Belarus in August 2020 were marked by the most massive protests in the entire history of independent Belarus. The large-scale repression that followed continues to this day.