Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor said messaging services Telegram and WhatsApp suffered temporary major outages in Russia on Wednesday, blaming a cyberattack.
Users of both platforms reported a surge in server connection problems starting at around 2pm Moscow time (11am GMT), according to monitoring websites.
Russia’s Federal State for Communications and Information Technologies said the “attack” which caused “massive disruptions” to the app’s services was repelled within an hour and that services were operating normally again.
Regulators blamed the outage on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber attack aimed at Russian telecommunications providers.
A DDoS attack aims to overload a website with malicious internet traffic, forcing it offline.
The outage came as human rights groups accuse Moscow of stepping up internet censorship and banning websites that publish independent information about the Ukraine conflict.
Russia designated WhatsApp’s parent company Meta as “extremist” in 2022 and blocked access to Meta’s sites, Instagram and Facebook as the Kremlin tightens its control over the social media sector.
Authorities have also threatened to ban popular video-sharing site YouTube after users in Russia reported difficulty accessing the site earlier this month.
