Blocking of gambling sites in Ukraine led to inaccessibility of a pizzeria and a bookshop

Erroneous blocking of commercial resources

Attempts by Ukrainian authorities to counter illegal gambling have led to unforeseen consequences: websites of ordinary businesses were caught in the ban. Thus, in October, resources that have no connection whatsoever to gambling were included in the lists of restricted addresses, which are formally attributed to the gambling business. Among the affected were the website of the Ukrainian pizzeria Crazy Pizza and the bookshop AK Books.

Scale of erroneous measures

According to the UABlockList monitoring system, 3,985 addresses were added to the blocking list during October. In addition to the aforementioned food service establishments and book retail, the following were restricted:

• the cryptocurrency service bitcoin.com;
• the domain name sales platform HugeDomains.

All these resources were erroneously categorised as illegal gambling.

The Cloudflare Pages incident

A similar situation had occurred previously. In September, state bodies included the entire internet platform Cloudflare Pages (pages.dev), as well as several domains for creating subdomains — br.com, cn.com, and com.de, in the blacklist. Numerous companies host their websites on these platforms.

Due to these measures, Ukrainian internet users lost access to a large number of resources not related to the gaming industry. For example, it became impossible to open the personal blog of German cybersecurity researcher Lilith Wittmann, who had previously hacked the systems of gambling regulators in Malta and Curaçao.

Government reaction and lack of explanations

In October, the National Network Management Centre, acting on a request from the Bureau of Economic Security (BEB), lifted the block on Cloudflare Pages and the three specified domains. However, the authorities have not provided official explanations regarding the reasons why these resources were initially included in the gambling lists and subsequently removed from them.