Attempts to completely restrict Telegram intensify in Russia

Reports of Telegram outages are mounting in Russia, with difficulties using the messenger reaching rarely seen levels, according to service status tracking websites.

Russian authorities have been slowing down traffic to the platform since February, but attempts to completely restrict access to the app escalated in late March and April.

Telegram down across Russia before the weekend

Russia is now trying to fully block the popular messaging service Telegram on its territory, local and regional media reported Friday.

“Anomalies” affecting access reached 95% on the morning of April 10, jumping from 79% on Thursday, the independent Russian investigative media outlet Agentstvo found out first.

Referring to data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), a global platform monitoring online censorship, it noted in a post:

“This is the highest anomaly rate ever recorded since the new restrictions on the messaging app began in Russia on March 20.”

Russia’s telecom watchdog, Roskomnadzor (RKN), started throttling Telegram in early February, citing non-compliance with requests to remove prohibited information.

Attempts to interrupt traffic started the following month, ahead of a reported April 1 deadline for the messenger to meet Moscow’s requirements regarding content moderation.

Since then, they have intensified periodically, usually towards the end of the working week, Agentstvo pointed out and commented:

“These figures may indicate that Pavel Durov’s messaging app is already being blocked more severely than WhatsApp and Signal.”

“For comparison, the officially blocked Signal and the effectively blocked WhatsApp on Friday morning had an anomaly rate of 89%,” the outlet added.

Long before the current crackdown, Russian regulators had already banned Signal, Discord, and Viber by the end of 2024.

Besides going after Telegram, the RKN practically banned WhatsApp when it deleted its domain this past February. Each had over 90 million users in Russia.

Voice calls through both were limited in August 2025, with Roskmonadzor claiming they had become a favorite tool for fraudsters, extremists, and cybercriminals.

User reports of outages on sites like Downdetector also rose sharply overnight between Thursday and Friday, the report further detailed.

Detector404.ru has registered over 5,000 complaints in 24 hours, as of the time of writing. Reports have also increased on another Russia-focused tracker, Сбой.рф, with over half of them coming from the capital Moscow and Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

Putin hits Telegram ahead of unpopular decisions, says Zelenskyy

Discussing the blocking of Telegram in Russia, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attributed the ban to Moscow preparing to make “unpopular decisions.” In a post on Friday, he suggested:

“Perhaps this is the end of the war in one format or another. Or, conversely, an escalation.”

In the first case, he pondered, the Kremlin would have to deal with part of the Russian society that has been radicalized by propaganda and is not ready for an end to the war.

And the second means even greater mobilization, this time sending people from the large cities to the front, Zelenskyy commented at a press conference, quoted by Ukrainian media.

“In my opinion, these are two main scenarios, but, of course, there may be other motivations. And soon we will see which of the scenarios Putin chose,” he concluded.

Telegram has been under pressure over content moderation lately, not just in Russia, but also in Ukraine, as previously reported by Cryptopolitan.

The messenger is widely used by soldiers on both sides in the conflict. Moscow and Kyiv have now committed to a truce for the Orthodox Easter this weekend.

Reacting to the RKN’s crackdown on Telegram, founder Pavel Durov recently urged Russians for “digital resistance,” highlighting that 65 million of them still use it, bypassing the blockade via VPNs.

His call came after a recent report revealed that Russian authorities have foiled a number of protests in defense of the messenger in various parts of the vast country.

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