On January 26, a presidential election took place in Belarus. The day before and after election were marked by internet censorship and access blocking. According to the statement of the Central Election Commission, incumbent Alexander Lukashenka won over 86% of the votes among five candidates and was elected for the seventh consecutive term, having been in office since 1994, for over 30 years.
The presidential election campaign took place in an unfree atmosphere, with all opposition parties dissolved, freedom of speech severely restricted online and offline, and most of the opposition politicians in prison or in exile. There are 1,245 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Center.
Order for internet blocking
The order to isolate national-hosted websites was given by the Operational and Analytical Center under the President of Belarus, reports hosting provider Hoster.by: “In accordance with the order of the Operational and Analytical Center under the President of the Republic of Belarus (OAC), from 10:00 on January 25 to 23:59 on January 27, 2025, Belarusian hosting providers will limit access to virtual hosting from outside the Republic of Belarus,” the statement says.
These measures, according to the OAC, are determined based on threats to the information infrastructure objects and the information processed with their use.
The hosting provider warned customers that using external services may result in potential limitations in the availability of their resources: “If your DNS record is not directed to hoster.by servers, we strongly recommend changing it to point to our servers. This will help minimize the consequences of blocking external traffic and preserve the availability of your sites,” said the company.
In fact, this blocking affected all sites of pretty much all Belarusian organisations, regardless of the domain name (that is, not only in the domain zone “.by”), because according to paragraph 2 of the Edict of the President 1 February 2010 № 60 “On measures to improve the use of the national segment of the Internet,” all Belarusian legal entities are obliged to host their sites on servers located in the territory of Belarus.
However, in practice, during this 3-day blocking period, some websites of organisations remained accessible from abroad, including the website of the Central Election Commission itself. According to the reports, the restriction did not affect all sites, but mainly targeted small sites and initiatives that used the "virtual hosting" service, leaving large news platforms, banks, and online stores accessible. Users outside Belarus noticed the unavailability of the Myfin website, the personal account of Belarusian Railways, as well as the applications of Alfa-Bank, Beltelecom, and Eplus. At the same time, these resources continued to work for Belarusian customers.
In the previous election in 2020, the national segment of the internet was almost completely blocked, but the decision was not officially announced then (see Urgent appeal to the UN Special Rapporteurs about the internet disruptions in Belarus on 9 August 2020). Now in the 2025 election, in contrast to the 2020 situation, the authorities have outlined the direction and duration of the restrictions in advance.
Alexander Lukashenka stated on November 22, 2024 that the internet could be completely shut down if the 2020 protests were to be repeated.
National observers will assess the real scope of the internet shutdown. However, preliminary estimates already note that in addition to blocking in-country hosting, authorities applied explicit traffic filtering measures for VPNs (the virtual private network, VPN, is software that encrypts all your internet activities to prevent unauthorised access while spoofing your real IP address location to grant access to otherwise geo-restricted content.) On Saturday, January 25, around 10-11 a.m. Minsk time, users in Belarus experienced disruptions when connecting to VPN services and certain foreign websites. The issues affected at least 7popular anonymisation services, including Proton VPN, NordVPN, TunnelBear, Thunder VPN, VPN — Super Unlimited Proxy, X-VPN, Planet VPN. For the first time, Wikipedia experienced a disruption, being unavailable in Belarus for about an hour and a half. Experts observed that the problem spread to two protocols, WireGuard and OpenVPN, but it was possible to connect through the AmneziaWG protocol: “It looks like selective blocking of certain servers rather than general filtering of VPN traffic” - experts say.
Since most opposition resources, independent media and human rights CSOs have been blocked in Belarus for a long time, VPN is a popular means of accessing them from inside the country. For example, in the run-up to the elections, Proton VPN recorded an increase in signups of 170% above baseline, despite its product being already very popular within the country.
The problems were observed on both home and mobile internet, complicating access to foreign resources. However, some tools that provide uncensored access to internet and avoid blocking, such as Psiphon, and other, less popular VPNs, continued functioning without interruptions.
Freedom House’s Election Watch scores Belarus 7 from 32 points in the indicator Digital Sphere in his Election Watch 2025 (assessment was last updated on 12 December 2024) and ranks Belarus as “Not Free” with 22 from 100 points in Freedom on the Net 2024.