As Telegram, WhatsApp, and numerous other web services go down in Russia, Moscow blames attackers while activists suspect Kremlin interference

Internet users in Russia reported outages affecting a wide range of online services on Wednesday, including Telegram, WhatsApp, and Skype. About an hour after the issues began, Russia’s federal censorship agency blamed the disruption on a massive DDoS attack, but digital rights activists said it bears all the hallmarks of an attempted block by the authorities. Here’s what we know.

Russian users reported being unable to access numerous online services on Wednesday. According to outage tracking websites, the list of affected sites and apps included Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, Twitch, and the Russian social media service VKontakte. Telecom operators such as Rostelecom also reportedly experienced issues.

The outage was first reported by Telegram and WhatsApp users. According to comments on DownDetector, Telegram experienced problems in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Users in Moscow reported only being able to access the messaging app through a VPN. Mikhail Klimarev, the director of the Internet Protection Society, said that the WhatsApp outage only affected Russia. He speculated that the Russian authorities had begun blocking both of the messaging services.

Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, blamed the disruption on a DDoS attack, according to Russian state media. “On August 21 at 2:00 p.m., [Roskomnadzor’s] Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center detected an outage affecting several services on Russian territory. The outage was due to a DDoS attack on Russian telecom operators. As of 3:00 p.m. Moscow time, the attack has been repelled, and services are working as normal,” it said in a statement. The number of complaints logged by outage tracking services began to decrease around 3:00 p.m.

IT experts and activists have said the outage appears to be the work of the Russian authorities, according to Agentstvo Media. “This kind of thing usually happens when they activate their so-called ‘anti-messenger mode,’” said Mikhail Klimarev, noting that there have been similar outages in Dagestan, Sakha, and Bashkortostan during protests and periods of unrest in recent years. “I have the distinct feeling that something [similar] happened, but this time on the national level,” he said.

Sarkis Darbinyan, co-founder of the digital rights watchdog Roskomsvoboda, told Agentstvo that the outage was the result of a “centralized effort.” The group’s technical director, Stanislav Shakirov, said it appears that the Russian authorities were trying to target Telegram but that the block began causing problems with other websites and services. “We saw the same thing happen back in 2018,” he said.

The Russian government has tried to block Telegram before. The service was officially blocked by court order from April 2018 until June 2020, though it continued to be accessible in practice, and numerous politicians and state agencies began using it to publish official information. In 2020, Deputy Communications Minister Alexey Volin announced that the authorities had decided to stop trying to block Telegram after finding it unfeasible from a technical standpoint.

In July, YouTube began experiencing outages and slowdowns in Russia. A source from the Russian telecoms market told Meduza that the authorities had begun throttling the service. Rostelecom claimed the issues were due to technical problems with Google Global Cache equipment, though Google said there were no technical problems on their end.

In July, during WhatsApp service outages in Dagestan, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that the state was throttling the messenger, but he simultaneously implied that such actions would be a legitimate “counterterrorism” measure in theory.