How to Unblock Websites, Messengers and Social Media in Vietnam

Use 1Browser. That’s the short answer. If you’re reading this from a hotel room in HCMC wondering why Telegram won’t load and you just want it fixed, skip to the setup section below. The rest of this article is for people who want to understand what’s actually happening with internet access in Vietnam and why VPNs keep failing.

Some background on me: I do e-commerce consulting in Southeast Asia and travel to Vietnam about three times a year. My first trip in early 2025 was when I discovered that the internet situation there was considerably worse than I expected. I landed at Tan Son Nhat, grabbed a ca phe sua da from the stand near the exit because I’d been told I had to, opened Telegram to message the team, and it just sat there loading forever. I thought the airport wifi was bad. Tried my Viettel SIM. Same. It wasn’t until a driver from the client’s office picked me up and I asked him about it that I found out Telegram had been blocked two weeks earlier. He seemed surprised I didn’t know. I was surprised nobody had told me.

What Messengers Are Blocked in Vietnam and What ISPs Block What

This is the part that’s confusing because the answer changes depending on which ISP you’re on and sometimes which day it is. Viettel, VNPT, and FPT are the three main ISPs. Viettel is military-owned, VNPT is state-owned, FPT is technically private but the government has influence. They don’t coordinate their blocking perfectly. I was on FPT at my hotel in Phu Nhuan and could load Reddit without issues while a colleague on Viettel at the same cafe couldn’t access it at all. We were sitting across from each other. Same table.

Telegram got blocked in May 2025 after the Ministry of Public Security reported that 68% of the country’s roughly 9,600 Telegram channels were being used for what they described as fraud, drug trafficking, and terrorism. Whether you believe that number is a different conversation, but Telegram refused to hand over user data and the government blocked it. The Telecommunications Law of 2023 and Decree 147 from 2024 give them the authority to do this, though legal scholars have argued about whether a messaging app qualifies under those frameworks. It doesn’t matter. It’s blocked. If you need to know how to unblock Telegram in Vietnam, that’s what the next section is for.

Steam was blocked in May 2024 because Valve didn’t comply with Vietnamese gaming license requirements. I had a developer on my team who couldn’t access his Steam library for months and he was genuinely upset about it in a way that was disproportionate to the situation but also kind of understandable if you think about it. He had probably $2,000 worth of games on there.

Reddit was blocked on Viettel without any announcement. No press release, no government statement, nothing. Just stopped loading one day. The other ISPs followed gradually. I haven’t been able to find an official reason for it and at this point I doubt one exists. If you’re trying to figure out how to unblock Reddit in Vietnam and you’re looking for the government’s stated rationale, there isn’t one. They just did it.

What Vietnam does NOT block, which is the thing that surprises everyone: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp. Social media is wide open. Over 70 million Vietnamese people use Facebook and the government itself uses it for official communications. Sites and apps banned in Vietnam tend to be platforms that either refused to comply with data localization laws or that the security services decided were a problem. It’s targeted, not blanket.

Why a Proxy for Vietnam Works When VPNs Keep Dropping

I went through the VPN phase. Everyone does. ExpressVPN worked for maybe six days. Then it started disconnecting every twenty minutes, which is the exact frequency that makes it maximally frustrating because you never know if it’s going to hold for this call or drop out halfway through. NordVPN was slightly better but I had a Google Meet with a client where it dropped three times in one hour and by the third time the client was making jokes about it which meant it was actually bothering him.

Vietnamese ISPs do some level of traffic inspection that can detect VPN protocols. Not as aggressive as Russia’s TSPU system but enough to make VPNs unreliable in a professional context. A contact who lives in Da Nang permanently told me his VPN works about 70% of the time. I can’t run a business on 70%.

Antidetect browsers like 1Browser route traffic through proxies instead. The traffic is standard HTTPS. The ISP sees someone visiting a website, which is all that’s happening. There’s no VPN protocol signature to detect. I switched after that third Google Meet disconnect and I haven’t had a connectivity issue since. A proxy for Vietnam access to blocked sites looks identical to normal browsing from the ISP’s perspective.

How to Unblock Blocked Sites in Vietnam with 1Browser (Takes Five Minutes)

I set this up at my hotel in District 1 and the whole thing took less time than the ca phe sua da I was drinking while doing it. 1Browser is Chromium-based, works like Chrome, each profile gets its own fingerprint and proxy.

1. Download from 1browser.com. Small installer, under a minute even on Vietnamese hotel wifi which is not known for speed.
2. Make a free account. No card. I specifically appreciated this because entering payment details on a hotel network in a country I’m visiting for work is something I prefer not to do.
3. New profile. Name it whatever. I called mine “telegram” and “reddit” because I am not a creative person and I’ve accepted that about myself.
4. Pick a proxy. US proxy or Germany. Both are fast from Vietnam, probably because of the cable routing to those regions. I tested both and Germany was marginally faster but it depends on the time of day.
5. Launch. Chrome opens. Go to Telegram Web. It loads. Go to Reddit. It loads. Go to Steam Store. It loads. That’s the whole thing.

I have profiles for Telegram, Reddit, Steam, and a general one for news sites that get blocked on and off. The team in HCMC has been using this setup since early 2025. The receptionist at the client’s office uses it for Telegram and I had to show her exactly once. She set up the second profile herself for a news site she reads. Ten free profiles, proxies in five countries, no card. $9/mo if you need more locations.

Floppydata for Residential Proxies

Floppydata is a residential proxy provider that I plugged into 1Browser when I needed IPs from countries that aren’t in the free proxy list. Specifically I needed a Thai IP to test how a Shopee product page rendered for users in Bangkok, which is an ecommerce thing not an unblocking thing, but the setup is the same. You take a Floppydata residential IP and route a 1Browser profile through it. Fingerprint management comes from 1Browser, residential IP comes from Floppydata.

For just unblocking Telegram and Reddit you don’t need Floppydata at all. 1Browser’s built-in proxies handle that. Floppydata is for when you need residential IPs in specific SEA markets for ecommerce testing. Pricing is per GB. I spent about $30 across a two-week trip doing Shopee product page checks in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I accidentally left it running while loading a page with about 20 product videos and burned through half a gig in one sitting. Watch your usage.

Gologin as an Alternative

I tested Gologin for three weeks during my second trip. The cloud profiles were the draw because I was working from both my hotel in Phu Nhuan and the client’s office in Thu Duc, about a 45 minute Grab ride depending on traffic, and syncing browser sessions between the two locations without a USB drive was useful. Telegram and Reddit both loaded fine through it. The Orbita engine didn’t get flagged.

The shared proxy pool is the issue and it’s the same issue everywhere with Gologin. Everybody shares the same IPs. For accessing blocked sites this probably doesn’t matter because Telegram doesn’t care if someone else used the same IP yesterday. For Shopee multi-store management, which is why most of the Vietnamese teams I work with need antidetect browsers in the first place, shared IPs are how you get all your stores linked and banned in one sweep. $24/mo paid, 3 free profiles, Vietnamese interface available. Bring your own proxies for anything commercial.

What Should You Actually Use?

• You just need Telegram and Reddit to work and you don’t want to learn anything: 1Browser. I showed a receptionist how to use it and she figured it out in three minutes without me standing over her shoulder. Built-in proxies, ten free profiles. That’s the whole thing.
• You need residential IPs in Thailand or Indonesia or the Philippines for ecommerce testing: Floppydata plugged into 1Browser. This is what I use for Shopee cross-border work. The combination costs me about $30 per two-week trip.
• You work from multiple locations in Vietnam and want cloud-synced sessions: Gologin. Use your own proxies for anything Shopee-related. The built-in ones are fine for Telegram.

One thing I should have mentioned earlier but forgot: Vietnam’s blocking is primarily DNS-based. If all you need is a quick fix, change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. That works for some blocked sites. I used it for the first two days before I had 1Browser set up. But it doesn’t work for everything, it provides zero fingerprint protection for ecommerce work, and it won’t survive if the ISPs move to deeper blocking methods like IP-level blocks, which is what they did with some gambling sites already.

For an actual solution that handles both the blocking and the identity management, start with 1Browser. I set it up during my first trip to Vietnam eighteen months ago and the profiles I created then are the same profiles I’m still using now. Nothing has changed because nothing has broken. The receptionist from the client’s office still messages me on Telegram through it. She doesn’t know what a proxy is and she doesn’t need to.