The Russian government has blamed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for the widespread outages of several popular mobile applications.
The outage affected a number of messaging apps and online services, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, Twitch and VKontakte, a Russian social network.
However, people in Moscow reported regaining access to the services when they used a VPN, leading some to suspect that Russian authorities were responsible for the outage.
DDoS or Kremlin Blockade?
Roskomandzor, Russia’s federal censorship agency, reported the outage, stating: “On August 21 at 14:00, (Roskomnadzor’s) Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center detected an outage affecting several services on Russian territory. The outage was the result of a DDoS attack on Russian telecom operators. As of 15:00 Moscow time, the attack had been repelled and services were operating normally again.” (Via Medusa).
The outage also affected Telegram users in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
This isn’t the first time widespread application outages have been reported in Russia. Russian activist and blogger Mikhail Klimarev said: “This kind of thing usually happens when they activate their so-called ‘anti-messenger mode’. I have a strong feeling that something (similar) happened, but this time on a national level.”
Telegram has previously been sanctioned by the Kremlin, with a court order that bypassed all appeals and effectively blocked the messaging app from April 2018 to June 2020. However, it was still used by some official channels to share information and was eventually unblocked. It remains a popular platform in Russia, particularly for sharing details and analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia recently blamed a slowdown in YouTube’s service within the country on Google’s failure to invest in its infrastructure, something both Google and tech experts have rejected, with many more Russian activists blaming the Kremlin for throttling the service. Google has since announced that it will shut down Russian AdSense accounts due to “ongoing developments” within the country.