Against the backdrop of rolling blocking of IP addresses by Roskomnadzor, government agencies began purchasing equipment for VPN

State authorities, enterprises and banks began to massively purchase private VPN networks, according to Znak.com , as well as Fontanka , citing data from the public procurement website.

According to media reports, the National Guard, the Pension Fund, RusHydro, Rosselkhozbank (it is headed by the son of the head of the Security Council Dmitry Patrushev) decided to buy the VPN. The Belgorod branch of this bank is ready to pay almost 10 million rubles for services in organizing and maintaining VPN channels.

In addition, VPNs were needed by the Federal State Unitary Enterprise State Corporation for Air Traffic Management in the Russian Federation, the forest management of the Leningrad Region, central district hospitals in several Russian regions, and municipal centers for civil defense and emergency situations.

VPN is also needed by the regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in particular, in the Rostov region (they plan to allocate 37 million rubles for this purpose).

Petersburg Metro, according to Fontanka, decided to create a VPN channel to protect it from outside interference.

On April 13, the court ruled to block Telegram for refusing to provide the FSB with encryption keys from users' correspondence. On April 16, Roskomnadzor began large-scale blocking of IP addresses. On the eve of this, and even more so after the start of the confrontation, a lot of recommendations appeared on the Internet to use VPN networks, which make it easy to bypass Roskomnadzor blocking. The agency, in response to this, first threatened to block the VPN services themselves, and soon really began to do so.

As a result of the actions of officials and providers executing orders, many sites and services not related to the messenger stopped working at all or experienced interruptions in work. At the same time, Telegram itself continues to function. The founder of the messenger, Pavel Durov, assured that Telegram would take all possible measures to circumvent the restrictions.

The founder of Telegram also began to pay out millions in grants to administrators of VPN channels and proxy services from his own funds.