The Russian government has blamed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for the widespread outage of several popular mobile apps.
The outage affected several messaging apps and online services, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Skype, Wikipedia, Steam, Discord, Twitch and VKontakte, a Russian social network.
However, Moscow residents reported regaining access to the services by using a VPN, leading some to speculate that Russian authorities were to blame for the outage.
DDoS or Kremlin blockade?
Roskomandzor, Russia's federal censorship agency, reported the service disruption, saying: “On August 21 at 2:00 p.m., [Roskomnadzor’s] The Public Communication Network Monitoring and Management Center detected an outage affecting several services on Russian territory. The outage was caused by a DDoS attack on Russian telecom operators. As of 15:00 Moscow time, the attack was repelled and services are operating normally. (Via Jellyfish).
The outage also affected Telegram users in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
This is not the first time widespread app outages have been reported in Russia. Russian activist and blogger Mikhail Klimarev said that “such things usually happen when they activate the so-called 'anti-messaging mode'. I have a clear feeling that something is wrong.” [similar] “It happened, but this time on a national level.”
The Kremlin had already sanctioned Telegram with a court order that bypassed any appeal process and effectively blocked the messaging app from April 2018 to June 2020. However, several official channels continued to use it to share information and it was eventually unblocked. It remains a popular platform in Russia, particularly for sharing details and analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia recently blamed the slowdown of YouTube services in the country on Google's lack of investment in its infrastructure, something that both Google and tech experts have rejected, and many Russian activists have blamed the Kremlin for throttling the service. Google has since announced that it will close AdSense accounts based in Russia due to the “ongoing events” in the country.
