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

Short version: we tested 44 consumer services, 19 eSIM stores and 10 VPN vendors from Istanbul. Twenty-five are blocked. Discord and Roblox are the two 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 10 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 (we use NordVPN, installed before flying). Tested from a Turkish mobile network, 10 September 2026.

What is blocked, in order of how much it hurts

We tested 44 more services. Two 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Most published blocklists for Turkey are copied from each other and years out of date.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 11 September 2026, and the response time is reported alongside the result.

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.

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 11 September 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. Any major provider. Install the app on your phone and laptop, log in, connect once to make sure it works, and turn on the obfuscated mode if the app has one. ★ NordVPN is the usual pick: fast, has an obfuscated mode, and its App Store and Play listings still open from Turkey even though its website does not. Surfshark is the cheaper multi-device alternative, though as of 10 September its site no longer loads from Turkey either, so install it before you fly.

You are already in Turkey with no VPN. Go to the App Store or Google Play first; the listing for most providers opens even when the website does not. If that fails, 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.

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 NordVPN link on this page is an affiliate link, which earns 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.