In a Saturday post on Telegram (reported by Bloomberg), Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov claimed that Russia’s “blocking attempts” aimed at VPNs, “just triggered a massive banking failure; cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide yesterday.”
Russia’s heavy-handed government interference in the internet is a fairly recent trend. It’s become relatively common for internet services in Russia to suddenly stop working as the government works behind the scenes to prune away something it doesn’t like in one place and causes collateral damage elsewhere.
Late last month, as part of what commentators were calling the Great Crackdown, Russia’s minister of digital, Maksut Shadayev, announced an effort to “reduce VPN usage.”
Shadayev made the announcement on Max, the official everything app of Russia, designed to centralized digital life in the country, but significantly, do so without any apparent encryption or privacy protections that can prevent the government from seeing what users are doing. In February, Russia essentially deleted WhatsApp and Telegram from its version of the internet in a fairly transparent effort to drive 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, accounts from “The Bell and other Russian media” banking apps were disrupted. This disruption might have been, “caused by an overload in the filtering systems run by Russia’s communications watchdog, according to the reports,” Bloomberg explained, “with experts warning that major restrictions risk undermining network stability.”
Durov, for his part, seems to characterize Russia’s crackdown on Telegram in particular as a total failure. He claims that, thanks to VPNS, 50 million Russians still use it per day.
For accuracy, over 50M Russians send at least one message every day, with 65M daily active users in Russia overall despite the ban. Monthly active users remain to be seen, but could easily be twice as high.
— Pavel Durov (@durov) April 4, 2026
Durov is Russian by birth, but also has passports from Saint Kitts and Nevis, the United Arab Emirates, and France.
In 2018, an earlier attempt to crack 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 crack a device without having it in one’s hand. According to the Moscow Times, when Russia attempted to block Telegram, Russian internet users, “experienced major disruptions with online payments, games, even so-called ‘smart homes’ while Telegram lost an estimated 3 percent of its Russian audience.”
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