Gemini’s VPN workaround stops working for some users in Russia

Google’s Gemini AI has stopped working for some users in Russia, according to complaints on the Downdetector website. Kod.ru, a Russian tech outlet, flagged the outage.

Gemini was already unreachable from Russian IP addresses, but the disruption has now spread to users accessing it via a VPN. The outage coincided with the release of Gemini 3.7 Flash, a new version of the AI model.

Experts consulted by Kod.ru said the problem may stem from how VPN services operate or how Google determines users’ locations.

“Many VPN services exclude google.com and some other Google services from the tunnel by default, so search and email work faster. But that means traffic to those services goes directly from the user’s real IP address, and Google sees that the person is in Russia, not in the VPN’s home country,” one of the sources said.

“Google has increasingly been determining a user’s location not just by IP address, but by a combination of behavioral signals, including location data from Google Maps. If users from Russia systematically connect through a particular VPN server, over time Google’s algorithms begin to associate that address with Russian jurisdiction, even though the server is physically located in another country,” another source said.

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