on a saturday mail in Telegram (reported by Bloomberg), Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov claimed that Russia’s “blocking attempts” targeting VPNs “simply triggered a massive banking failure, with cash briefly becoming the only payment method across the country yesterday.”
The Russian government’s harsh interference on the Internet is a fairly recent trend. has become relatively common Internet services in Russia suddenly stop working while the government works behind the scenes to remove something it doesn’t like in one place and causes collateral damage elsewhere.
At the end of last month, as part of what commentators called the Great RepressionRussia’s digital minister Maksut Shadayev announced an effort to “reduce VPN use.”
Shadayev made the announcement on Max, Russia’s official everything app, designed to centralize digital life in the country – but, significantly, it does so without any apparent encryption or privacy protections that could prevent the government from seeing what users are doing. In February, Russia essentially deleted whatsapp and telegram from its Internet version in a fairly transparent effort to attract more users to Max.
VPNs (virtual private networks) allow users to bypass blocks and access services by routing their own traffic through network nodes located elsewhere.
But amid its effort to weaken VPNs on Friday, according to Bloomberg, the banking app accounts of “The Bell and other Russian media” were disrupted. This outage could have been “caused by an overload in filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog, according to reports,” Bloomberg explained, “and experts warn that major restrictions risk undermining network stability.”
Durov, for his part, seems to characterize the Russian crackdown on Telegram as a total failure. He claims that thanks to VPNS, 50 million Russians still use them daily.
For greater precision, more than 50 million Russians send at least one message each day, with 65 million daily active users in Russia overall despite the ban. Monthly active users remain to be seen, but could easily be double that.
– Pavel Durov (@durov) April 4, 2026
Durov is Russian by birth, but He also has passports from Saint Kitts and Nevis, the United Arab Emirates and France..
In 2018, a previous attempt Cracking down on Telegram reportedly produced a similar result. Russia apparently sought backdoor access to Telegram messages, only to be thwarted by the fact that Telegram’s on-device encryption makes it impossible to decrypt a device without having it in hand. According to the Moscow TimesWhen Russia attempted to block Telegram, Russian internet users “experienced major disruptions with online payments, gaming, and even so-called ‘smart homes,’ while Telegram lost about 3 percent of its Russian audience.”
