Russia blocks tens of thousands of IP addresses owned by the cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean

Russia’s federal censor has blocked tens of thousands of IP addresses owned by the U.S.-based cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean. According to a copy of Roskomnadzor’s “out-load” list, late on April 18, the agency ordered Russian ISPs to start blocking the subnets 167.99.0.0/16 and 206.189.0.0/16, each of which masks 65,000 IP addresses.

Multiple IP-identification services attribute the IP addresses contained in these subnets to DigitalOcean. On Twitter, the company says it is “monitoring the situation,” while acknowledging that “there is no direct action” it can take as a provider “if a national government decides to block [its] IP addresses for their citizens.”

According to the company Netcraft, DigitalOcean is the third most popular cloud infrastructure provider in the world. The Google-owned service Outline, which allows journalists and activists to create and run VPN servers, recommends by default that users rely on DigitalOcean.

By blocking millions of IP addresses operated by Google and Amazon, Roskomnadzor has also disrupted access to several Russian businesses and online services. At least 73 entrepreneurs have appealed to the human rights group “Agora” (whose lawyers also represent Telegram against the Russian state), demanding that the Attorney General’s Office review the legality of Roskomnadzor’s actions.