Russia's Roskomnadzor Changes Tactics: New VPN Block Wave Targets Hosting Infrastructure
On 4 August 2026 Russia's Roskomnadzor carried out one of its largest VPN block waves in recent memory. More than twenty popular services went down at once — but the headline isn't the count, it's the approach: restrictions increasingly target not a single protocol or app, but the base infrastructure VPNs run on — entire IP ranges belonging to hosting providers. Here's what changed and why it matters to anyone using a VPN in Russia.
What happened
According to industry outlets, dozens of VPN services simultaneously hit unreachable servers and dropped connections on 4 August 2026. The wave affected more than twenty popular solutions. What sets it apart from earlier blocks is the target: where filtering systems once hunted for a specific protocol or app, restrictions now land on hosting providers' IP addresses wholesale. It wasn't "protocol X" that got blocked — it was the data center where many services' servers happened to sit.
This is part of a broader trend. By late February 2026 Roskomnadzor already reported 469 restricted VPN services, and since December 2025 individual transport protocols — SOCKS5, VLESS, L2TP — have been falling under blocks too. In parallel, Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is discussing new measures aimed specifically at hosting providers' IP addresses and at "masked" VPNs.
Why hitting infrastructure is more dangerous than blocking a protocol
A protocol block can be worked around technically: change the obfuscation, ship a client update, add another masking layer. But when an entire hosting provider's IP range is blocked, every server sitting there goes down — regardless of protocol or how well it's masked. Services that rent capacity from just one or two large providers are especially exposed: close their ranges and the whole service falls at once.
What reduces the risk — and what a VPN can actually do
No VPN today can honestly promise "we'll never be blocked" — that would be a lie. But a service's resilience to this tactic comes down to a few architectural things:
- Own infrastructure, not resold access. Services that run their own servers across different providers and countries lose only part of their nodes when one range is blocked — not everything.
- Protocol-level obfuscation. Traffic masking (like AmneziaWG) doesn't help against IP blocking, but it defends against a separate, equally important attack — recognizing VPN traffic by the "shape" of its packets. Two different layers; you need both.
- Fast server switching. When one node goes unreachable, the app itself should move the user to a working server — not leave them staring at a spinning "Connecting…".
How HamikVPN is built
We run our own servers across different sites and countries — this is not reselling access to a single host. Traffic runs over AmneziaWG with obfuscation, so at the protocol level it doesn't look like a typical VPN. And the app receives an ordered list of nodes from the service: if the main server stops responding, the client automatically switches to the next working one — no manual steps, nothing to reconfigure.
An honest caveat: this is not a guarantee of absolute invulnerability, which doesn't exist. But the combination of distributed own infrastructure, protocol obfuscation and automatic failover is exactly the line that today separates "the service survived the block wave" from "the service went down entirely."