The Russian government has blamed the widespread outage of several popular mobile applications on a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

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 services when using a VPN, prompting some to speculate that Russian authorities were to blame for the outage.

DDoS or Kremlin blocking?

Roskomandzor, the Russian federal censorship agency, reported on the outage, stating, “On August 21 at 2:00 p.m., [Roskomnadzor’s] Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center detected an outage affecting several services on Russian territory. The outage was due to a DDoS attack on Russian telecom operators. As of 3:00 p.m. Moscow time, the attack has been repelled, and services are working as normal.” (Via Meduza).

The outage also affected Telegram users in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

This isn’t the first time widespread application outages have been reported within Russia, with Russian activist and blogger Mikhail Klimarev saying that, “This kind of thing usually happens when they activate their so-called ‘anti-messenger mode.’ I have the distinct feeling that something [similar] happened, but this time on the national level.”

Telegram has been sanctioned by the Kremlin before, with a court order circumventing any appeal process and effectively blocking the messaging app from April 2018 until June 2020. However, it continued to be used by a number of official channels to share information and was eventually unblocked. It continues to be a popular platform in Russia, particularly to share details and analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia recently blamed a slowdown in YouTube’s services within the country on Google’s failure to invest in it’s 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 be shutting down Russian-based AdSense accounts due to “ongoing developments" within the country.

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