Russia saw a temporary outage of the well-known messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram on Wednesday. The disruption was ascribed to a cyberattack by Roskomnadzor, the nation’s media authority.
Around 2:00 p.m. Moscow time (1100 GMT), users started reporting connectivity problems, according to monitoring websites. Many people were impacted by the outage on both sites.
According to Roskomnadzor, the cyberattack caused serious problems before being swiftly stopped. Both messaging applications returned to normal functionality within an hour.
The regulator identified the cause of the outage as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack floods a network with excessive traffic, causing it to slow down or crash.
These interruptions happened as worries about Russian internet control grew. The Russian government is allegedly imposing more restrictions, particularly on websites that offer unbiased information about the current conflict in Ukraine, according to human rights organizations.
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Russia branded WhatsApp’s parent firm, Meta, as “extremist” in 2022 and obstructed access to Instagram and Facebook. The Kremlin has been exerting more control over online content as a result of its tightening hold on social media.
Authorities have also threatened to shut YouTube, another frequently utilized platform. Earlier this month, some users in Russia reported issues accessing the video-sharing sharing-site.
