Since the end of May, Russians cannot access xvideos.com, the most popular porn site in the country (5 million requests on Yandex against 2 million on Pornhub) and in the world.
It just loads endlessly and only works via VPN. There are no errors when downloading or redirecting to the Roskomnadzor page, as usually happens when blocked.
Why? It’s not clear yet. In their tweet, the owners of the resource say that they were “blocked” in Russia.
In oh-so-general, we were blocked in Russia a few days ago. Given the circumstances, we’ll take that as a compliment.
But we studied all of Roskomnadzor’s current registries and checked the address via Roscomsvoboda, a service that tracks blockades – no mention of XVIDEOS.
The registry of forbidden information on the request “xvideos.com” is empty.
It is not in the registry of pirate sites.
Nothing in the registry of extremist sites either.
However, GlobalCheck monitoring network shows 0% availability of this pornographic resource in Russia.
In other words, it is blocked, but formally it does not exist, at least there were no statements or reports from the state authorities.
Only Pornhub has no problems with access from Russia – the site opens through all providers across the country. But it is worth recalling that Pornhub is the only porn site in the country, which can only be accessed after age confirmation via VK.
Update: Since at least June 9, both XVIDEOS and XNXX have been back up and running. Whether the problem was blocked by Russia, as the XVIDEOS administration claimed, or whether the problem was on the side of the sites is unknown.