Telegram and WhatsApp down in Russia amid widespread outage

Thousands of Russians have reported being unable to access dozens of apps and websites, including popular messaging platforms WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram, following a mass internet outage, the Downdetector monitoring platform reported on Wednesday.

Users first started reporting connectivity issues at around 2pm on Wednesday, state-affiliated business daily RBC wrote, adding that while most of the outage reports came from Russian cities, some users in Kazakhstan and Finland also had trouble accessing Telegram.

The outage affected not just messaging apps, but numerous other websites and apps as well, from Wikipedia and Skype to Russia’s public services portal Gosuslugi and Pornhub, but most users reported being able to access the affected platforms and websites with a VPN.

“Phone operators reported that overall traffic had dropped by 10–15% in an hour,” Mikhail Klimaryov, the head of Internet Without Borders, a conference series and hackathon focused on combating Russian digital censorship and propaganda, said on Telegram.

Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor said the mass outages were caused by “a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack on Russian communications operators”, which Klimaryov dismissed as “a lie”, noting that it is impossible to target every phone operator at once in a DDoS attack.

Earlier this month, Russian users lodged thousands of complaints about video sharing platform YouTube not loading, following an announcement by State Duma Deputy Alexander Khinshtein who said in July that the Russian authorities would begin slowing YouTube speeds down by as much as 70% in an apparent retaliation for YouTube removing pro-Kremlin channels.

Russia has also previously blocked popular messaging app Signal for “violations” of the country’s anti-terror legislation, while popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X have been inaccessible in Russia without a VPN since the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.