voidly
Active Incident

Confirmed: sustained censorship in BH (2026-05)

Bahrain · May 19, 2026 · 12 days

OONI detected 11 days of elevated network interference averaging 91.9% anomaly rate.

Evidence

92%
Anomaly Rate
11
Measurements
85%
Confidence

What This Means

92% of 11 network tests from Bahrain failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 89+ 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 Score85% certainty of censorship
Detection TimeMay 19, 2026

Corroborating Evidence (11)

Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.

OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference11 records
middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 1/2 measurements anomalous (50.0%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.50
May 31, 2026
View source →
middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 6/7 measurements anomalous (85.7%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.86
May 30, 2026
View source →
middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 3/4 measurements anomalous (75.0%)"OONI report
Signal value: 0.75
May 30, 2026
View source →
middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 4/4 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
May 30, 2026
View source →
middlebox-detection
"OONI http_invalid_request_line: 2/2 measurements anomalous (100.0%)"OONI report
Signal value: 1.00
May 30, 2026
View source →
+ 6 more OONI records

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 BH (2026-05) [BH-2026-0103]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/BH-2026-0103

Related

Related incidents