Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year

loopback_device

> Traffic shifts seen in some networks/locations due to phased integration of new IP geolocation provider There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was

neurotixz

Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl... In a nutshell: Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

egorfine

Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care? Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.

tananaev

Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

ogurechny

Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”. Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment. I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.

tzury

I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region 1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w

ivankra

VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic. "By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1] [1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...

miohtama

Russia testing whitelisted only Internet today https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20

robotnikman

Maybe its just me, but it feels like there has been a lot less ransomware attacks since the Ukraine/Russia war started as well.

viktoresku

In addition to the obvious growth in popularity of VPNs, there are two other subtle points: 1. Many Russian IP addresses are now registered to foreign offshore companies to avoid confiscation in the next package of EU sanctions. Being Russian, they were registered through RIPE, which created a risk. The same IP which was Russian a year ago, now can be listed as Madlovian or Magnolian remaining physically in Russia. 2. Cloudflare is a biased internet: the most traffic-heavy sites using Cloudflare are porn sites. That is, we can only draw conclusions here about changes in the structure of porn content consumption in Russia. High-traffic western websites censored in Russia - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ... - are not on Cloudflare anyway and their blockade does not contribute to this chart.