Russia’s telecom and Internet regulator Roskomnadzor stated on Monday that it requested telecom operators to block access to Telegram, following a court decision from last week.
In an interview with Russian business daily Vedomosti on Monday, Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov said the regulator had first blocked 9,000 Telegram IP addresses.
However, blocking access to the service did not prove that easy. Telegram routed traffic through Amazon, Google Microsoft and other cloud services, forcing the Russian authorities to block millions of additional IPs.
On Tuesday afternoon, a tracker of IP addresses showed that more than 16 million addresses had been blocked.
Number of IP addresses blocked to cut access to Telegram
Source: Meduza.io
Roskomnadzor’s measures caused collateral damage to a number of other resources which were unrelated to Telegram. These included OK (Odnoklassniki), a leading Russian social network, and Viber, one of Telegram’s competitors.
“Some users in Russia are experiencing problems making calls on Viber. These issues seem to come from connectivity problems to Amazon Web Services in Russia,” Viber tweeted, assuring that their team was “working around the clock to restore [full] access” to the service.
“Digital Resistance”
In spite of this massive campaign, Telegram was still accessible to many Russian users on Tuesday.
“We haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies,” claimed Pavel Durov on Tuesday evening. (Read Meduza’s detailed report on why Roskomnadzor has failed so far to block Telegram.)
He thanked Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft “for not taking part in political censorship.”
“We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise,” Telegram’s founder said.
Durov — who left Russia in 2014 — also pledged “millions of dollars this year” in bitcoin grants to support what he called “digital Resistance.” Individuals and companies who provide proxies and VPN services to users in Russia and elsewhere do “support Internet freedoms,” he believes.
In a tweet on Tuesday evening, Edward Snowden, who found an exile in Russia in 2013 after revealing to the world the NSA’s global surveillance system, came out in support of Durov. “I have criticized @telegram’s security model in the past, but @Durov’s response to the Russian government’s totalitarian demand for backdoor access to private communications – refusal and resistance – is the only moral response, and shows real leadership.”
Sources: Vedomosti, The Moscow Times, The Guardian
