NextDNS stops working in Russia after its servers are blocked

NextDNS, a popular paid DNS service that filters ads and trackers and encrypts DNS lookups, has stopped working for many users in Russia. Since late October, users in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Omsk and Syktyvkar have reported on the NextDNS support forum that websites and apps fail to load while their devices are set to use the service. On October 31 a NextDNS staff member said in another thread that, judging by the reports, the company's IP addresses and TLS names had been blocked. "There isn't much we can do unfortunately," the employee wrote.

A DNS service turns site names into server addresses, so when the resolver a device relies on is unreachable, almost nothing works. Phones still show a network connection, but pages, messengers and apps stop loading. A user in Omsk on the ISP Dom.ru posted a diagnostic report showing that connections to every NextDNS server timed out, over both IPv4 and IPv6. In Syktyvkar, one user said the service still worked on a wired connection but not on the Yota mobile network. Several users said everything loaded again when they turned on a VPN.

Neither Roskomnadzor, Russia's internet regulator, nor any ISP has commented on the outage. The users on the forum blame the state filtering equipment that Russian operators are required to install, known as TSPU, but the thread itself does not confirm the cause. The story spread in Russian media on November 1 after a reader's post in the community section of Naked Science.

Read the full article on vpnlab.io: https://vpnlab.io/en/nextdns-blocked-russia-3169