Active Incident
Confirmed: sustained censorship in AE (2026-02)
United Arab Emirates · February 8, 2026 · 20 days
OONI detected 45 days of elevated network interference averaging 85.0% anomaly rate.
Evidence
85%
Anomaly Rate
45
Measurements
80%
Confidence
What This Means
85% of 45 network tests from United Arab Emirates failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 82+ percentage point difference strongly indicates intentional blocking.
How We Detected This
Data Sourceooni
ML ModelGradientBoosting v3.3 (LOCO median F1 0.87, honest across 127 countries)
Confidence Score80% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeFebruary 8, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (45)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference45 records
tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 6/9 measurements anomalous (66.7%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.67
Feb 28, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 8/8 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
Feb 28, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 6/7 measurements anomalous (85.7%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.86
Feb 28, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 11/13 measurements anomalous (84.6%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.85
Feb 28, 2026
View source →tor-blocking
"OONI tor: 6/12 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
Feb 27, 2026
View source →+ 40 more OONI records
Affected Services (2)
SignalTor
What we cannot say
- Who caused it — measurement data alone does not attribute this to any government, ISP, or other actor.
- Intent — anomalous or unreachable measurements indicate interference, not a stated motive or a deliberate-vs-incidental determination.
- Which networks — no specific ASN/ISP is identified for this incident.
- The mechanism — we cannot state whether this was DNS tampering, TLS/SNI reset, an HTTP blockpage, throttling, or an infrastructure outage.
- Sub-national scope — measurement is aggregated at the country level; we cannot localize to a province, city, or network segment.
- Independent corroboration — this rests on a single source; treat it as a single-source signal, not a multi-source confirmation.
Cite This Incident
Voidly Research. (2026). Confirmed: sustained censorship in AE (2026-02) [AE-2026-0252]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/AE-2026-0252
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