This entry draws on reporting by OC Media and Qəzetçi.

Access to OC Media, an independent online news outlet covering the South Caucasus, has been blocked in Azerbaijan. The outlet reported that readers first alerted it in early June that the website could no longer be reached from inside the country, and that traffic from Azerbaijan dropped sharply around the same time. Attempts to load the site from multiple regions of the country have since failed unless a VPN is used. Despite this, the Ministry of Digital Development and Transport claimed that no restrictions had been imposed and that there was no problem accessing the site. Azerbaijan’s Presidential Administration did not respond to the outlet’s inquiries.

If confirmed through technical measurement, OC Media joins a long list of independent and opposition news websites blocked in Azerbaijan. The websites of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Azerbaijan service, Meydan TV, Azadliq, Azerbaycan Saati, Turan TV, and OCCRP were blocked between 2017 and 2019 following amendments to the Law on Information, Informatization and Protection of Information in 2017, which authorized extrajudicial blocking of online resources. More recently, the websites of Abzas Media and Toplum TV were blocked amid the sweeping crackdown on independent media that began in November 2023, in which around 30 journalists have been placed in pre-trial detention or convicted, most commonly on smuggling and tax-related charges. Meydan TV has said its mirror websites are also periodically blocked, and that its social media pages have been repeatedly attacked.

A new “single engine” for online control

The timing of the block is significant. On June 2, 2026, the presidential website published two decrees that attracted little attention amid the routine flow of official announcements. The first abolished the Electronic Security Service (ESS), the roughly 30-person technical body created in 2013 under the Ministry of Digital Development and Transport. The second established its successor, the National Cybersecurity Agency (NCA), and approved its 50-clause charter.

The NCA is set up as a “public legal entity” – a legal form the government increasingly favors, as it places the body outside standard ministerial constraints while allowing it to generate its own revenue, with its authorized capital drawn from budget funds previously allocated to the ESS. On paper, the reorganization reads as administrative housekeeping aimed at “improving management.” In practice, as OC Media’s analysis of the charter shows, the decrees consolidate functions that were previously dispersed across ministries, courts, and the prosecutor’s office — website blocking, traffic filtering, personal data oversight, protection of broadcasting, even blocking of foreign gambling sites – inside a single well-resourced agency answerable to the minister and, ultimately, the president.

Two aspects deserve particular attention from an internet freedom perspective:

Choke-point control over traffic: The charter assigns the agency network-defense functions, such as filtering malicious traffic. While this is standard language for a cybersecurity body, the same infrastructure that absorbs DDoS attacks can throttle or degrade specific services. Azerbaijan has a documented record of exactly this: nationwide throttling during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, and localized mobile internet disruptions during protests, including the 2019 protest outside the Baku City Administration building, where journalists and demonstrators reported mobile internet failures on site. The decree institutionalizes a permanent, presidentially supervised hand on that choke-point.

Surveillance and data oversight: The charter embeds surveillance-adjacent capabilities into the agency’s mandate and transfers oversight of personal data to it – a concerning combination in a country where Pegasus spyware was used against journalists, activists, and lawyers, and where no independent data protection authority exists.

Human rights lawyer Yalchin Imanov noted that the government has been restricting access to independent media websites since at least 2017, and that the new institutional setup arrives amid the harshest assault on the Azerbaijani press in more than a decade: Abzas Media shuttered and its journalists sentenced to seven to nine years in June 2025 (together with RFE/RL economist Farid Mehralizada); Toplum TV raided; Meydan TV’s Baku-based staff arrested; the BBC’s Baku bureau closed; the Turan news agency suspended; and the accreditations of Voice of America and Bloomberg correspondents revoked.

Why this matters

Until now, internet controls in Azerbaijan operated through a patchwork: the Ministry issued blocking orders (often without court decisions), the Prosecutor General’s Office pursued users and editors over online content, and the ESS handled technical security. The NCA gathers these levers into one institution at precisely the moment parliament is debating amendments that would require social media platforms to register locally, open offices in Baku, and enforce new age restrictions – with fines of 100,000–300,000 AZN and blocking as penalties for non-compliance. A single agency with blocking, filtering, and data oversight powers is the natural enforcement arm for that regime.

It is also worth noting an institutional irony: the ESS – whose officials were publicly explaining how age verification under the new social media rules would work as recently as June – has itself been dissolved, its functions absorbed into a body with a far broader censorship mandate and fewer checks.