Telegram lockdown affected Viber and WhatsApp

A large number of users of Internet instant messengers (not only Telegram) from Russia were left without communication due to Telegram blocking by Roskomnadzor. The agency blocks various IP pools in an attempt to close access to the service of Pavel Durov to users in the territory of the Russian Federation. These actions are accompanied by "side effects" in the form of disruption of work in no way connected with the Telegram services.

On Friday, it became known that blocking began part of the IP-addresses that are used by WhatsApp and Viber. Somewhat later, they were removed from the blacklist, but many users of these instant messengers in the territory of the Russian Federation are still not able to work with them normally, Kommersant writes .

Yesterday, on Friday, Viber representatives officially announced that telecom operators blocked access to the messenger servers, which is why many people could not connect to the service. “It seems that this situation is due to the decision of some telecom operators to block access to a number of servers, including those using Viber. At this stage, we do not understand the reasons for this. Again, Viber users suffer from a solution that is not directly related to Viber, ”the company said.

Representatives of Down Detector, a service that monitors the correctness of Internet resources and services, said that the European part of Russia suffered the most from Roskomnadzor’s actions.
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So, 98% of Viber users in this region experienced some problems with the messenger, it was impossible to work with it yesterday because of technical failures. According to Down Detector, more than half (51%) of users complained about the lack of connection, another 33% could not send and receive messages, and 15% had problems with authorization.

The representative of VimpelCom made a statement in which it was stated that the blocking of the service is directly related to the blocking of IP addresses of Telegram. But Megafon boasted no failures: “Where possible, we try to minimize the negative impact of locks on the provision of services to users. There are no failures in the work of instant messengers in the MegaFon network, everything is working normally. ”

Whatever it was, but Roskomnadzor denies involvement in the problem with Viber. The head of the supervisory service, Alexander Zharov, said: “Roskomnadzor did not enter IP Viber into the registry of prohibited resources, it is easy to determine this by analyzing uploads of a single registry of prohibited information for a day. Viber problems have nothing to do with the actions of Roskomnadzor. ”

When analyzing the same download, it becomes clear that Roskomnadzor contributed 329 IP addresses of WhatsApp and 18 IP addresses of the Russian hosting provider Selectel. According to Philip Kulin, the general director of the DIPHost provider, just an hour after the "fall" of the messengers, the entries were deleted from the registry. The situation after that improved, but not by much. WhatsApp continues to work intermittently, demonstrating the impossibility of connecting to the network in many cases.

Among other things, several dozens of messages from Russian users came that it was also impossible to connect to the App Store mobile application store. Here the situation is not completely clear - it is possible that these users simply fail the network connection without the impact of Roskomnadzor. Yet a few dozen messages are not thousands, the problems are rare.

At the moment, WhatsApp audience exceeds 24.6 million active users per month. Viber is slightly lower - 19.8 million people.

As for the fight against Telegram, Roskomnadzor has been diligently blocking IP addresses, which, in the opinion of the agency’s employees, are related to the messenger for the past month. Nevertheless, there is still no result. The activity of users of the application has decreased by a few percent, and this is partly due to seasonal factors.

One of the reasons for the lack of results in the work of Roskomnadzor is the response by the messenger. As far as we know, the service staff have used specialized methods of circumventing locks, which allow the service to operate in Russia.

Losses of Russian companies due to the actions of Roskomnadzor amounted to about one billion US dollars. According to Medusa, about 117 million rubles are spent on the blocking data accounting system annually.