The rate of failed attempts to access the messaging service Telegram in Russia reached a record 95% on Friday morning, according to data from the internet measurement project OONI reported by the media outlet Agentstvo.
Russia's Telegram crackdown hits record high, with 95% of requests failing
Photo: Novaya Gazeta Europe
The rate of failed attempts to access the messaging service Telegram in Russia reached a record 95% on Friday morning, according to data from the internet measurement project OONI reported by the media outlet Agentstvo.
The failure rate is the highest recorded since Russia began ramping up its blocking of Telegram earlier this year. The previous day, failures were logged in 79% of cases, which is roughly in line with what has become the new normal in recent days.
Infographic: OONI
The messaging apps Signal, which is officially banned in Russia, and WhatsApp, which has been effectively blocked, both showed a failure rate of 89%, Agentstvo noted.
User complaints on the outage-tracking platforms Detector404 and Sboy.rf surged on Thursday night, emphasizing the scale of the blockage. Detector404 logged 3,600 complaints over a 24-hour period, including 806 in a single hour. VPN users appear to have been affected as well: the Netherlands ranked third among complaint locations, behind St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Sboy.rf had received 1,026 complaints by mid-morning on Friday, compared to 1,771 for all of the previous day. The bulk of reports came from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Sverdlovsk and Novosibirsk regions.
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