"We've seen a significant increase in VPN sales coming from Russia," Surfshark's Gabriele Racaityte said, reaffirming the experience of other providers. One user wrote "War started, and I'm worrying the government may start to restrict access to the internet even more than ever before."
Like ClearVPN, FastestVPN is offering the people of Ukraine and others affected by censorship three months of its services for free and has targeted the region with email campaigns. Similarly, FastestVPN told us that it had seen visitor traffic in Russia increase by 115%, with downloads up 40%.
"In the past week, we saw traffic to our website from Russia increase by around 330% week over week," Li said the company does not provide specific user counts or regional download figures. "We are seeing some trends that indicate a growing interest in VPNs from Russia," ExpressVPN Vice President Harold Li said. On March 1, MacPaw took the decision to remove ClearVPN from Russia and Belarus to prevent it from being used as a tool in the cyberwar against Ukraine. MacPaw told us it had seen its daily active users increase by 15 times, with around 5% of its new users coming from either Russia or Belarus, it says the daily average number of active users has quadrupled in those countries in the space of a week, despite the company not running any marketing in either. Ukraine's own ClearVPN, developed by MacPaw, says that since February 24 it has received over 100,000 installs, in part thanks to its offer of a free one-year subscription to all users and its decision to make the app free in Ukraine. While less prominent in Russia, many of the best iPhone and iPad VPN vendors you might be more familiar with are also seeing a big uptick in interest.
Cogent carries 25% of all the globe's internet traffic.
Russia's communications watchdog continues to block access to multiple media outlets, and the situation was complicated further Friday when ISP Cogent Communications announced it was terminating its services in Russia. The move led to the BBC suspending the work of all its journalists inside the country while it assessed the implications of the measure. In the past few days Russia has completely banned access to social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, and on Friday passed a law in the country criminalizing anyone who referred to the conflict in Ukraine as a war. Preliminary estimates from Sensor Tower provided to iMore indicate that the top five VPN apps on the App Store in Russia have seen their total downloads increase by a staggering 2691% week-on-week from February 25 through March 3. Now, mainstream VPN providers confirm that they have seen a big uptick in traffic and downloads from Russia, with customers citing specific concerns about the war and access to information in the country since the invasion began.
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues and intensifies, hundreds of thousands of Russian iPhone users are turning to VPN software in the face of unprecedented censorship in the country, according to multiple mainstream VPN providers and app data platform Sensor Tower.Īs Ukraine continues to offer stiff resistance in the face of Russian aggression, an intensifying war of information is being fought all around the world as the country seeks to shield its citizens from Western media coverage and companies seek to distance themselves from the conflict.