If you’re a Turkish citizen and avid internet user, I’m sure you are familiar with the unstable political climate in Turkey that has led to several internet blockages throughout all of 2016. The source of the internet blocks have come directly from internet service providers giving into government demands that access to social media websites or the internet altogether be blocked.
Websites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, cannot be accessed in Turkey. In certain regions, entire areas have no access to the internet–which the UN describes as a basic fundamental right.
Recently, however, as of last Friday, November 4th, the Turkish government has stepped up their country-wide censorship to stop VPN users from getting around the ongoing internet restrictions.
Turkey Bans VPNs
Here is a list of all of the affected VPNs in Turkey: Tor Project, VPN Master, Hotspot Shield VPN, Psiphon, Zenmate VPN, TunnelBear, Zero VPN, VyprVPN, Private Internet Access VPN, Express VPN and IPVanish VPN.
If you’re using any of these VPNs you might not be able to unblock internet websites or regain access to the internet due to ISPs blocking these VPN providers.
It’s not entirely clear how Turkey is banning these VPN providers, but I speculate that Turkey is banning IPs through domain blocks through ISPs, or the government is rooting out VPN users with shared IPs.
Which VPNs work with Turkey?
While it’s hard to test which VPNs work with Turkey without actually being there, we can report on which VPNs still claim to be working. TorGuard is one such VPN that is claiming they still work, and we aren’t too surprised that they are given that they work in equally strict countries like China and Russia.
They use tools like Stealth VPN to hide VPN use which works well to make sure they don’t get blocked. See more about Stealth VPN here.
