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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.

“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. 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.

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