Russian authorities’ attempts to restrict the use of VPNs amid their pressure campaign against the Telegram messenger may have contributed to the large-scale banking outage recorded across the country this week. That is what the service’s founder, Pavel Durov, said.
“Telegram was banned in Russia, yet 65 million Russians continue to use it every day through VPNs,” Durov wrote on Saturday on his Telegram channel. According to him, the authorities have spent years trying to block VPN services themselves, but the latest wave of restrictions produced the opposite effect: “Their blocking attempts simply triggered a massive banking outage—yesterday cash briefly became the only means of payment across the entire country.”
The restrictions introduced on Friday may have disrupted banking apps, The Bell and other Russian outlets reported, citing industry sources. According to those reports, the outage may have been caused by an overload of the filtering systems operated by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications watchdog. Experts warn that tightening such restrictions could undermine the resilience of the country’s network infrastructure. Russian authorities have issued no official comment.
It also emerged that, from April 1, payments in Russia for Apple services, including the App Store, stopped working—though the company did not explain why. Earlier, RBC reported that the Digital Development Ministry had recommended that telecom operators disable account top-ups, which may have been part of the effort to curb VPN use.
In recent months, Moscow has tightened its control over the internet and over digital services that are not under state management. The authorities are promoting their own app, Max—an analogue of China’s WeChat—while simultaneously restricting access to popular foreign platforms, including YouTube, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, and making Telegram harder to use. Over the past week, pressure on VPN services has intensified markedly—it is through them that users circumvent the blocks.
As Forbes.ru and RBC report, the authorities are also demanding that Russian online platforms—from IT companies to e-commerce services—block users connecting through VPNs. Among the measures under discussion are charging for VPN use once a certain volume of international traffic is exceeded, as well as restricting access to such services for VPN users as early as April 15.
Durov himself, who is under investigation in Russia on suspicion of facilitating terrorist activity, compared the situation to what happened in Iran, where similar restrictions merely accelerated the spread of VPN use instead of pushing users toward state-run apps.
“Welcome back to the digital resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters,” Durov wrote. “The whole country is mobilizing to get around these absurd restrictions.” He added that Telegram would continue adapting so that its traffic would be harder to detect and block.