Russia's September 2026 VPN blocking wave: 48 hours after the polls closed

On September 22, 2026, complaints started stacking up on outage trackers across Russia: VPN apps that would not connect, mobile data that crawled or vanished, and ordinary services, from Steam to the Federal Tax Service, timing out. The next day the numbers got worse, not better. If you are reading this because your VPN stopped working somewhere between Kaliningrad and Magadan this week, you are one data point in a wave that spans dozens of regions.

Every outlet covering the outages has treated them as isolated tech news. What nobody has assembled is the paper trail: in May, the business dailies Kommersant and RBC reported that the state's most unpopular measure against foreign traffic would wait until after the late September elections. The elections ended on September 20. The wave began on September 22. This post lays out that sequence, dated and sourced, and separates what is documented from what is not.

What happened to VPNs in Russia on September 22 and 23?

According to Downdetector data collected by Russian outlets on September 22, Moscow generated about 1,900 complaints at a rate of roughly 55 per hour, Moscow Oblast about 1,000, and Samara close to 600, with St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Rostov, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Tatarstan and Yakutia also on the list. The complaint mix was 72% general network failures, 18% mobile app failures and 8% website loading errors.

The named casualties tell you what kind of wave this is. VPN applications Dyadya Vanya VPN, Happ and Blanc VPN drew mass complaints, with every report about Dyadya Vanya coming from Android devices. The hosting provider Aeza was hit alongside them, and subscribers of Rostelecom and Megafon reported carrier-level problems. When VPN apps, a hosting company and two national carriers fail together, the failures are not a coincidence of bugs; they are consistent with filtering at the network level.

On September 23 the wave continued: about 2,500 complaints from Moscow, around 1,400 from Moscow Oblast, and 1,600 to 1,700 from St Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast combined, with MTS and Rostelecom at the peak of the carrier complaints and disruptions reported from Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Voronezh, Omsk, Kaliningrad, Magadan and a dozen more regions. Steam and DeepSeek logged complaint spikes in the thousands, and Telegram drew a wave of complaints of its own.

Roskomnadzor has not commented on either day. That silence is normal: the regulator did not explain the August wave either.

Was the timing planned around the elections?

Here is the documented sequence. Each row has a source, and none of them is anonymous.

To be precise about what this proves and what it does not: the May postponement concerned the traffic surcharge, not blocking as such, and no official has connected this week's wave to the election calendar. But the surcharge reporting put a date on something that usually stays unsaid: the restriction would arrive once the voting was over. A post-election squeeze is a censorship pattern in which a government defers its most unpopular internet restrictions until voting ends, then resumes or escalates them within days. The dated sequence above is what that pattern looks like from the outside.

The e-voting detail belongs in the same picture. The system that processed a record number of online votes was found learning, voter by identified voter, who had a VPN switched on. Nothing was blocked and nothing had to be hacked; the answer simply landed in the server logs. No official explained why.

How does this wave differ from the August 4 one?

The August 4 and 5 wave was, in Meduza's words, one of the biggest VPN blocking campaigns in recent memory: more than 20 services failed at once, taken out through blocks on entire hosting networks rather than one service at a time. Two weeks later, Meduza reported that the target lists apparently drew on address data that Russian apps had collected on their own users.

September looks like the same machinery running on schedule rather than a one-off campaign. The September 7 and 8 failures showed the same signature, apps unable to fetch server lists and tunnels that establish but carry nothing, and the September 22 wave added a hosting provider and carrier-level disruptions to the mix. Since December 2025 Roskomnadzor has extended its filtering to additional protocols, including SOCKS5, VLESS and L2TP, according to reporting collected on Habr, and its own count of restricted VPN services went from 439 in January 2026 to 469 on February 26, the last official figure. A Roskomnadzor document surfaced in May putting the goal at 92% effectiveness in restricting VPNs by the end of 2030.

Are the mobile internet shutdowns part of the same thing?

They are a separate measure that happens to hit users in the same week, and it is worth keeping the two apart, because they fail differently and nothing a user does helps against the second one.

VPN filtering targets protocols, addresses and hosting networks. A mobile internet shutdown cuts data service across a whole area, and Russian authorities describe the shutdowns as a defense against Ukrainian drone attacks. The Record counted 59 regions with mobile internet restrictions as of September 21, 2026, and reported the human cost of the practice: Novaya Gazeta Europe estimates at least 36 civilians were killed in strikes this summer when sirens were not activated, and in seven regions users almost never received SMS danger alerts. During a shutdown, only services on the official white list stay reachable, and no VPN can help, because there is no connection underneath it.

So a user in Voronezh this week may have hit both at once: a filtered VPN protocol on home broadband and no mobile data at all outdoors. Complaints about both land in the same Downdetector graphs, which is one reason the picture looks so chaotic from inside.

Is using a VPN still legal in Russia?

Yes, in the narrow sense that matters to a user: no Russian law penalises a person for connecting through a VPN, and officials have said so on the record at least six times since December 2024. The pressure is aimed at the supply side, meaning VPN providers that ignore the blocklist, advertising, app stores, hosting companies and, since April 2026, large Russian platforms told to turn away visitors with a VPN on. We maintain a full reference of every Russian law and enforcement step from 2017 to 2026, with the ten rules that touch VPNs and who each one binds.

The one user-facing rule remains the fine of 3,000 to 5,000 rubles for deliberately searching for listed extremist material, in force since September 1, 2025, with six known cases in its first year. Meanwhile the demand side keeps growing: 40% of Russians told pollsters in spring 2026 they use a VPN, and Russians downloaded VPN apps 9.2 million times from Google Play in March 2026 alone, 14 times the figure a year earlier.

What Le VPN users in Russia should know

Le VPN's network remains reachable from Russia through both waves. Most of the failures our support team has seen this month are server specific: a connection to one server stalls while another works, so the first thing to try is simply a different server in the app. Our Stealth WireGuard protocol, which uses obfuscation to keep VPN traffic usable on heavily filtered networks, is being updated in response to the new filtering.

Two honest caveats belong next to that. First, during a mobile internet shutdown nothing works, including a VPN, because there is no connection to carry it. Second, no protocol makes VPN use invisible: as of April 2026 large Russian services actively check for one, and Moscow's voting site quietly did the same. A VPN protects the content of your traffic; it does not hide the fact that you are using one, and nobody should promise otherwise.

If you connect from Russia and a server fails, switch servers, update your app when the update reaches you, and reach support if neither helps. For the wider picture of where this is heading, the Russia page covers the country situation, and the crackdown reference above tracks every new enforcement step as it lands. On the evidence of this September, the steps now arrive on a political calendar.