“In the territories occupied by the Russian Federation, some VPN services and YouTube have stopped en masse – CHANGE In the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, access to YouTube is significantly restricted and popular VPN services have stopped working. Lantern and NTHLink are completely blocked, only separate paid VPNs work.”, — write on: unn.ua
Details
According to the publication, it is currently impossible to open YouTube with many free VPN services in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The monitoring of Lantern, NTHLink and Psiphon, which was carried out for Donbas Realia by local residents, showed that the Lantern and NTHLink services are not working fully.
Currently, paid and free versions of Psiphon provide access to YouTube (but the free developer version is no longer available to download, 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 is the Romanian Free VPN Planet. Two other services do not have clear data about the developers: “VPN Ukraine” belongs to AltApps company, the country of its registration is unknown, and Super VPN – to SuperSoftTech company, also with unknown registration, in addition, in 2020, this VPN was involved in a large data leak.
Subscribers of Donbas Realia 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.
Let’s add
Telegram channel “ZaTelecom”, the author of which is an IT expert and executive director of the “Internet Protection Society” Mykhailo Klimaryov, recorded a record drop in YouTube traffic in Russia on December 23. He analyzed traffic data through Google’s monitoring service, based on which he compiled a graph of YouTube’s slowdown, which shows that access to the video hosting service was 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 the territory of Russia.