Russian usage of VPN skyrockets with over 11,000% despite closing of 36,000 VPN URLs

Despite the efforts of the Russian government, the Russian people find new ways to access social media and international news outlets.

While numerous media have reported on the surge of VPN sales and installs in Russia following the de facto ban in the country of most western social media and news outlets, with SurfShark, one of the major players reporting a staggering 3500% increase in sales, AtlasVPN has monitored their installs on mobile devices, and reported an insane increase of 11,253% increase in installs in Russia alone during a period of just one week.

We are still unsure of the combined number of installs due to the many different service providers, but despite an older law in Russia requiring VPN services to still block many western news outlets, and the Russian government forcing Google to delist up to 36,000 URL's depending on source, it seems the Russian population is doing everything they can to win back their digital freedom and get news from other sources than state controlled and government sanctioned national news outlets.