Indonesia blocks millions of online gambling sites and posts, along with pornography and LGBT+ apps, and cuts off services that don’t register with its communications ministry, as Steam and PayPal found in 2022.
Every day we open 67 of the world’s biggest sites and apps from home internet connections in Indonesia, and record what’s blocked, since when and how.
2 of 66 testedsites and apps with a confirmed block in Indonesia
66 of 67 results confirmed in the last 48 hours. 1 older result awaiting a fresh test.
Tests are requested on Telkom Indonesia and XL Axiata home connections. 2 of them on only some networks.
These earlier results are kept as history and excluded from current block totals until a fresh test confirms them.
VimeoVideo & music
Older result: Blocked on some networks. Last confirmed 13 Oct 2026, 04:46 UTC.
First observed on 2 Oct 2026
A block page answers instead of the site on XL Axiata.
Background
Internet censorship in Indonesia
Blocking orders come from the communications ministry, renamed Komdigi in October 2024 and known before that as Kominfo. Article 40 of the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law lets it restrict content directly, and internet providers enforce its TrustPositif blocklist. In 2017 OONI and the Sinar Project found providers blocking mainly by hijacking DNS lookups, and unevenly: Telkom often blocked sites that weren’t on the list.
Online gambling is the biggest target: Komdigi says it acted against 4.03 million pieces of gambling content between October 2024 and September 2026. Sites with sexual content get blocked too, such as Tumblr from March to December 2018 and Reddit for about 11 years until July 2026. Freedom House says the LGBT+ dating apps Grindr and Blued, blocked in 2017 and 2018, and sites of the Papuan Student Alliance were still blocked in 2024.
A 2020 regulation, MR5, makes every online service available in Indonesia, foreign or local, register with the ministry as a private electronic system operator, and remove banned content within 24 hours of an order, or four in urgent cases. Services that don’t register get blocked: Steam, PayPal and Yahoo in July 2022, and in February 2026 Wikipedia’s login system, which Komdigi said it would restore once the Wikimedia Foundation registered.
Enforcement widened in 2025 and 2026. Komdigi briefly blocked the Internet Archive in May 2025 over gambling and pornography it had archived, and cut off Grok from 10 January to 1 February 2026 over fake pornographic images made with AI. Since 28 March 2026 a regulation has made eight platforms it rates high-risk, among them YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X and Roblox, start deactivating the accounts of users under 16.
VPNs in Indonesia
Freedom House says tools for getting around censorship are largely accessible in Indonesia, which had the world’s third-highest number of VPN downloads in 2023, though some websites offering such tools are blocked.
Key dates
Komdigi lets Reddit back in after about 11 years, once Reddit agrees to geoblock content Indonesia treats as illegal, such as gambling and pornography.
Komdigi blocks Wikipedia’s login system because the Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t registered as an electronic system operator; reading stays open.
Komdigi cuts off Grok for three weeks over AI-made fake pornography, until X Corp commits in writing to new safeguards.
Steam, PayPal, Yahoo and Epic Games are blocked for failing to register under the 2020 rules, until they comply.
The ministry cuts mobile data in Papua during unrest, saying it wants to stop hoaxes and provocative messages; calls and text messages still work.
The ministry blocks Telegram’s web version over radical and terrorist content until August, when Telegram agrees to remove such content faster.
Get past a block
Blocked in Indonesia?
A VPN connects you through a server in another country, so the blocks in Indonesia no longer apply. Where VPNs themselves are blocked, you need one that can disguise its traffic.
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History
Changes in Indonesia
No confirmed changes since monitoring began on 29 Sep 2026. When a block appears or lifts, and a re-check on several machines agrees, it shows up here.
Method
How we test
Test machines on Telkom Indonesia and XL Axiata home connections open each site’s homepage every day.
A failure counts only when it happens twice on the same network, while the site opens from other countries.
A change is published only after re-checks a few hours later and again the next day, on several machines per provider, confirm it. It’s dated from the first sighting.
Test machines caught getting around blocks, through a VPN or a filter-dodging tool, are set aside.
We test websites, mostly over home broadband. Apps, calls and mobile networks can behave differently.
Only partly. Every year since 2018 the government has suspended mobile data in Bali for Nyepi, the Hindu day of silence, to ward off hoaxes and negative content, Freedom House says. Fixed-line connections, such as home broadband, aren’t restricted.
Is Telegram Blocked in Indonesia?
Its web version was, for a few weeks in 2017. The communications ministry blocked it on 14 July 2017 over radical and terrorist content, and restored full access in August, after Telegram agreed to appoint a contact for the government, filter such content and handle complaints the same day.
Is Netflix Blocked in Indonesia?
It was on some networks from 2016 to July 2020. Freedom House says Netflix was unreachable for Telkom Indonesia and Telkomsel customers in those years, though the ministry never formally announced a block, and that it lifted its blocking orders in July 2020 after Netflix agreed to meet content rules and takedown requests.
