Some VPN services and YouTube have been massively shut down in the occupied territories of the Russian Federation

In the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, access to YouTube has been significantly restricted and popular VPN services have stopped working. Lantern and NTHLink are completely blocked, only some paid VPNs are working.

In the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, along with a significant restriction on access to YouTube, some VPN services have also stopped working. Donbas Realiya was informed about this by local residents.

Details

According to the publication, it is currently impossible to open YouTube with many free VPN services in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Monitoring of Lantern, NTHLink and Psiphon, conducted for Donbass Realiya by local residents, showed that the Lantern and NTHLink services are not fully functional.

Currently, the paid and free versions of Psiphon provide access to YouTube (but it is no longer possible to download the free developer version, only Psiphon Pro is offered).

In addition, residents report that VPN Clear, Planet VPN, “VPN Ukraine” and Super VPN are still working. The developer of Clear is the Ukrainian company MacPaw, Planet VPN – the Romanian Free VPN Planet. The other two services do not have clear data about the developers: “VPN Ukraine” belongs to the AltApps company, the country of its registration is unknown, and Super VPN – SuperSoftTech company also with unknown registration, in addition, in 2020 this VPN was involved in a major data leak.

Donbas Realia subscribers also write about VPN disconnection in the comments, in particular, they are talking about the NTHLink service, on the basis of which an explainer was developed for residents of the occupied territories.

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The Telegram channel “ZaTelekom”, the author of which is IT expert and executive director of the “Internet Protection Society” Mikhail Klimarev, recorded a record drop in YouTube traffic in Russia on December 23. He analyzed traffic data from Google's monitoring service and based on it, he created a graph of YouTube slowdowns, which shows that access to the video hosting service had been significantly limited for several days before. The channel stated that “YouTube is de facto blocked in the Russian Federation”.

The Internet in the occupied territories of Ukraine is controlled according to the same principle as in Russia.