Why ChatGPT will not open and DeepSeek will

“It does not open” comes in three flavours, each cured differently. Below: our measurement, and how to tell which one you have.

Three different refusals that look the same

To a person all three read as “broken”. To the network they are three different events, and you can tell them apart by what arrives instead of the page.

• A country refusal. The service knows which country the request came from and says it does not serve that country. Such an answer is usually signed in words: “not available in your region”, “country … not supported”. That is the service’s own decision, not your operator’s.
• A refusal aimed at the address. What the service dislikes is not the country but the address itself: it can see this is a datacentre server shared by many people at once. Then you get a “verify you are human” page, or a short refusal with no explanation. That case has its own article.
• The network never delivered it. No page arrives at all: endless loading, “the request timed out”, a spinner. Here nothing is answering — for mobile networks that is a separate story.

What our measurement showed

On 22 September 2026 we requested the front pages of seven services from four of our own addresses — in the Netherlands, Poland, Germany and Russia. Those are exactly the four countries the app offers as locations. The three European addresses answered identically, so they share one column.

The cleanest line in that table is the first one. OpenAI’s API endpoint answers in text rather than pictures: from the European addresses it says “I see no key” (the request arrived, we simply did not introduce ourselves), and from the Russian one it returns the code unsupported_country_region_territory and those words about the country. There is no guessing here: the service names the reason and signs it itself.

And the other side of it, which we did not hide: DeepSeek and Gemini answered our Russian address exactly as they answered the European ones. If what you need is an AI assistant rather than one particular name, there may be nothing to change in your network at all.

How to tell whose refusal it is

Three steps, none of them needing an app or a setting.

1. Read what the page says. “Region”, “country”, “not supported”, “unavailable in your region” means a country refusal. “Verify you are human”, “Just a moment” means a refusal aimed at your address. A blank screen and “the request timed out” means the network.
2. Open the same address on a different network. Mobile data instead of Wi-Fi, or the other way round. If the answer changes, it is the network; if it stays the same, it is the service.
3. Open a neighbouring service. If DeepSeek and Gemini open and only one particular service does not, that is its own rule, not a general outage.

You can see your own address, and the country sites read from it, on our IP address check — it installs nothing and works in any browser.

What another country’s address changes, and what it does not

It changes one thing: the service sees an address in the country you left the network through. The refusal in the first row of the table — “we do not serve this country” — is about exactly that.

It does not change three things.

• The “verify you are human” page. It looks not at the country but at the fact that the address is shared and belongs to a datacentre. In our measurement Perplexity showed it from all four addresses at once.
• The service’s own rules. Its terms are a contract with it, and a network does not rewrite them. What they say about your country is yours to read.
• Payments. Money does not travel the same path as pages; we did not test the payment side of other people’s services and claim nothing about it.

What we tested

• The tool. curl over IPv4 with a mobile browser’s header, on 22 September 2026. We requested the front pages of six services and one OpenAI endpoint that answers in text rather than pictures.
• The vantage points. Four of our own servers: the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Russia. These are the very machines the app leaves the network through when you pick a location.
• How we told refusals apart. By the service headers: a challenge page arrives marked cf-mitigated: challenge, while a country refusal arrives without that mark and with different text. So “403” in two columns does not mean the same thing.

What we do not know

• How it will go in your browser. curl is not a browser: it has neither JavaScript nor cookies, so it never passes a “verify you are human” check, while a browser usually passes it in a couple of seconds. So “a challenge instead of the page” in our table does not mean “it will not open for you”.
• Sign-in, payment and the chat itself. We only looked at what the server answers to the first request. Signing in, paying and using the chat may behave differently — we did not test that.
• Home and mobile addresses. All four of our addresses belong to datacentres. What these services answer to a home line or a SIM card, this measurement does not say.
• Tomorrow. This is a snapshot of one day. Services change their rules without announcing it; when we measure again, we will update the article.

Short answers

Why does ChatGPT not work in Russia? Because the service does not serve that country and says so in its answer, word for word. That is its decision, not a fault in your internet.

Does DeepSeek work? In our measurement it answered all four addresses the same way, the Russian one included. We measured nothing about the chat itself after signing in.

Mine says “verify you are human”. Is that the same thing? No. That is a different flavour: it is about the address, not the country, and changing country does not remove it. More in the neighbouring article.

The service opened, but sign-in fails. We did not test sign-in. All we know is that the first page arrived — beyond that, the service’s account rules begin.

Will Mayak give me access to AI services? We promise no access to anyone else’s service — each has its own rules. Mayak encrypts your traffic and sends it out through the country you choose; what the service then does is up to the service.

And how do I pay for such a subscription? Not our field: payments travel their own way and we did not measure them. Paying for our access is covered in the article about payment from Russia.

Will a VPN help? It changes exactly one thing: the country of the address the service sees. A country refusal is the only one that follows from that — a “verify you are human” check and the service’s own terms stay exactly where they were.

Why does it open one day and not the next? A “verify you are human” check comes and goes with the load on an address. A country refusal does not flicker like that — it is either there or not.