Russia Cuts the Internet More Than Any Country on Earth in 2025—Far Beyond Iran or Venezuela

Russia recorded the world’s highest level of internet censorship and shutdowns in 2025, with disruptions totaling 37,166 hours and affecting about 146 million people, according to The Moscow Times on January 8. 

The figures were drawn from Top10VPN’s  annual report tracking deliberate internet restrictions worldwide, the outlet said.

By total shutdown time, Russia was more than three times ahead of Pakistan (11,482 hours), Myanmar (9,888 hours), Equatorial Guinea (8,760 hours), Iran (170 hours), with lengthy disruptions also recorded in Iraq, Albania, Tanzania, and Venezuela.

Top10VPN’s experts estimated the damage to Russia’s economy from internet shutdowns, mobile internet disruptions, and the throttling of websites and social networks at $11.9 billion over the year, a total they said exceeded the combined losses of all other countries in the ranking, put at $7.8 billion. 

The outlet said that Russia’s 2025 wave was “unprecedented in both scale and technical sophistication,” describing a sustained, systemic approach that combined nationwide blackouts, selective service throttling and targeted protocol interference rather than short, event-driven outages. 

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Top10VPN said Russia last year began using a “16 kilobyte” tactic that restricted access to services hosted on Cloudflare  infrastructure and other Western websites by allowing users to load only the first 16 kilobytes of data.

The experts said that because Cloudflare underpins a large share of Western web infrastructure and online services, targeting it marked another concrete step toward Russia’s concept of a “sovereign Runet.”

It was later reported that new directives and enforcement trends could tighten Russia’s control over online services, alongside broader patterns of blocking, throttling, and disruption affecting major platforms and infrastructure.

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