What Is Blocked in Turkey: Checked October 2026, From Istanbul

Short version: we tested 44 consumer services, 19 eSIM stores and 11 VPN vendors from Istanbul. Twenty-eight are blocked. Discord, Roblox and three crypto exchanges (Binance, Coinbase and Kraken) are the consumer services that fail; the rest of the damage is concentrated in three places that hit foreigners. Booking.com for hotels inside Turkey. International eSIM stores, where 15 of the 19 we tested were unreachable. And VPN company websites, 8 of 11 blocked. On top of that, social media gets throttled for a day or two whenever there is major political news. A working VPN may help with these access restrictions; install and test it before you need it (our pick is Amnezia, whose website still loads from Turkey; details just below). Tested from a Turkish mobile network, 10 September 2026.

Is VPN banned in Turkey?

No. Using a VPN is legal in Turkey, and no law punishes you for it. What is blocked is the VPN companies’ websites: 8 of the 10 we tested from Istanbul did not load, on 10 September and again on 1 October 2026. Most VPN apps still work once installed, so install one before you fly.

What may change: in April 2026 a draft amendment to the Electronic Communications Law (No. 5809) was reported that would make VPN companies register with BTK, set up a Turkish company and appoint a local representative. Companies that do not comply would face fines of 1 million to 30 million TL, then bandwidth cuts of up to 95% and a block of their app and website. The draft was published by the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) and reported by Karar in May and Eastern Herald in June 2026, which said it had not yet gone to a parliamentary vote.

As of 13 October 2026 we found no report that it has passed. Separately, since 31 July 2026 Law No. 7590 has moved the power to block sites on national-security grounds (Article 8/A) from BTK to the Cybersecurity Directorate, and in September courts ordered at least 1,270 X accounts and the news site T24 blocked (Human Rights Watch, 12 October 2026). That hits Turkish news and activist accounts, not tourist services.

Two things follow for a visitor. The penalties fall on VPN companies, not on users. And if it passes, VPNs that refuse a licence will get slower and harder to reach from Turkey, so an obfuscated mode will matter more. The sections below show which VPN sites load today.

What is blocked, in order of how much it hurts

We tested 44 more services. Five are blocked.

Most published blocklists for Turkey are copied from each other and years out of date. This one is measured. Every service below was requested from a Türk Telekom line in Istanbul on 1 October 2026, and the response time is reported alongside the result.

New in October: Binance, Coinbase and Kraken

All three loaded in our 11 September test. On 1 October they did not. On Türk Telekom the request never reaches the exchange: the network answers in its place and redirects to its Güvenli İnternet filter page. kraken.com also failed on a Turkish mobile connection, so this is not a setting on one home line. We found no published decision naming these three. SPK, the capital markets regulator, has blocked dozens of unlicensed crypto exchanges, but the reports we found name others, such as MEXC and Poloniex. If you hold funds on one of them, a VPN still reaches the site.

How to read the bot-check rows

A Turkish block produces silence. The request goes out, nothing comes back, and the connection dies at whatever ceiling you set.

A fast error is something else entirely. Eight of the services above answered in under three tenths of a second with a 401, 403 or 429. That is the site’s own bot protection refusing an automated request, and a person in a real browser gets the page normally. ChatGPT and Medium both sit in that group, and both are plainly usable from Turkey.

The distinction matters because a table of status codes with no timings cannot tell the two apart, and most of the lists you will find do not try. It is also easy to get wrong in the other direction: NordVPN answered our command-line request with an error after 19 seconds, which looked like bot protection, but a real browser hung on the page and never loaded it. That one is genuinely blocked.

Booking.com: the one that catches everyone

The block is not on the website. It is on the product. A Turkish court ruled in 2017 that Booking.com was competing unfairly with licensed Turkish agencies, and since then the platform cannot show Turkish accommodation to users located in Turkey. You can open the site, log in, see your existing reservations. You cannot search Istanbul.

Practical consequences:

• Book your Turkish hotels before you arrive, or use a competitor. Hotels.com and Expedia are not affected. Airbnb is not affected.
• Changing dates on an existing Turkish booking from inside Turkey sometimes fails. Do it through the hotel or through a VPN.
• A VPN set to any other country makes Booking.com behave normally.

Parliament debated a tourism bill in 2026 that would let Booking.com return for domestic bookings under a Turkish licence. Until it is law and the site actually changes, assume the block.

eSIM stores

Covered in full in the eSIM guide. The short version: BTK’s decisions between July and September 2025 name about 37 international eSIM sellers. Those 37 are the regulator’s count, not ours — we tested the 19 largest from Istanbul on 10 September 2026 and 15 of them were unreachable, while Simbye, Breeze, Truely and Firsty loaded. A plan installed before landing works. Buying after landing only works with a provider whose store is not blocked. For the most-asked one, see is Airalo blocked in Turkey. All the numbers in one place are on our Turkey eSIM and internet block statistics page.

VPN websites: blocked, but the apps mostly are not

Turkey has blocked the websites of dozens of VPN companies in waves since 2016: about 10 in December 2016, 16 more in December 2023, and around 27 more in August 2024 during the Instagram block. Most of those are still blocked. Our website checks do not establish whether a VPN tunnel connects. Domain access and VPN connections can behave differently, and results vary by network. Practical options:

• If the app is already on your phone, test whether it connects on your current network. Obfuscated or “stealth” modes help on some networks.
• The App Store and Google Play listings for most providers still open from Turkey, so you can usually install the app even when the website is dead. Subscribing through the app store works too.
• Downloading a desktop client from a blocked website does not work without another VPN already running. Set up your laptop before you fly.

Blocks change without notice. We retest on a Turkish network at the start of every month and log what changed.

Test log

Timeline: every block, throttle and unblock since 2014

Turkey blocks in waves, usually by a BTK (telecoms regulator) decision or a court order, and rarely announces it. This is the record we keep so that the next time a platform disappears, there is a dated, sourced list to check against. Permanent link: nomadistanbul.com/kb/what-is-blocked-in-turkey-vpn/#timeline

Missing something? Email hello@nomadistanbul.com with a source and we will add it.

<p>Source: <a href="https://nomadistanbul.com/kb/what-is-blocked-in-turkey-vpn/">What is blocked in Turkey</a> (Nomad Istanbul), last tested 1 October 2026. Data: <a href="https://nomadistanbul.com/data/turkey-blocks.json">JSON</a>.</p>

Which VPN to use

Two situations, two answers.

You are still at home. Install the VPN on your phone and laptop before you fly, log in and connect once to make sure it works. Our pick is ★ Amnezia, for the same reason as below: it is built to get past VPN blocking, and its website still loads once you are here if you need to renew or reinstall. Big brands such as NordVPN and Surfshark can work if installed before you fly, but their websites do not load from Turkey.

You are already in Turkey with no VPN. Most big-brand sites will not load, so pick one whose site does. Our pick is ★ Amnezia: its website loads from Turkish networks and the app is built to get past VPN blocking. You can also try the App Store or Google Play, where the listing for most providers opens even when the website does not. Free option: Windscribe was reachable from Turkish networks on our test date and has a free tier that is enough for Booking.com and a throttled Instagram. IVPN also loads and is a solid privacy-first choice, though it has no free plan.

Comparing options? See our best VPN for Turkey guide.

Do not build your connectivity around a VPN. Turkey has shown it will block providers in batches. Have the eSIM and hotel questions solved before you need a VPN at all, and treat the VPN as the backup.

Social media throttling: what it looks like

During major political events, Turkish networks slow X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and occasionally WhatsApp to the point of not loading. NetBlocks, which measures this, confirmed it in March 2025 after the detention of Istanbul’s mayor and again in September 2025 around opposition rallies. It usually lasts from a few hours to two days and ends without announcement.

If your feeds stop loading and the news is loud, that is what is happening. A working VPN may restore access, but this is not guaranteed on every network. Messaging over Signal or Telegram has generally kept working during these periods; WhatsApp is hit some of the time.

Is any of this a legal problem for a visitor?

No. Using a VPN is legal. Reading blocked sites is not an offence. The blocks are enforced against the services, not against users. Where you should be careful is the same as anywhere: do not post things about Turkish politics or the president that you would not say in a police station, and do not photograph military sites.

Disclosure

The Amnezia and Simbye links on this page are affiliate links, which earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Windscribe and IVPN links are not. The reachability table comes from our own tests on the date shown, not from any provider, and we list providers that do not pay us where they are the right answer.