Active Incident
Confirmed: sustained censorship in Iraq (2026-05)
Iraq · May 1, 2026 · 8 days
OONI detected 34 days of elevated network interference averaging 94.6% anomaly rate.
Evidence
95%
Anomaly Rate
34
Measurements
85%
Confidence
What This Means
95% of 34 network tests from Iraq failed to reach these services. Global baseline failure rate is typically 1-3%. This 92+ 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 1, 2026
Corroborating Evidence (34)
Evidence collected from multiple independent sources. Upstream claims shown in quotes are not Voidly assertions.
OONIOpen Observatory of Network Interference34 records
blocking
"OONI telegram: 8/14 measurements anomalous (57.1%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.57
May 9, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 15/16 measurements anomalous (93.8%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.94
May 9, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 13/15 measurements anomalous (86.7%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.87
May 8, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 11/13 measurements anomalous (84.6%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.85
May 8, 2026
View source →blocking
"OONI telegram: 14/15 measurements anomalous (93.3%)"— OONI report
Signal value: 0.93
May 8, 2026
View source →+ 29 more OONI records
Affected Services (1)
Telegram
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 Iraq (2026-05) [IQ-2026-0197]. Voidly Global Censorship Index. https://voidly.ai/incident/IQ-2026-0197
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