Messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp have suffered widespread outages in Russia, the country's official media regulator Roskomnadzor said. He blamed it on a cyberattack, AFP reported.
Users on both platforms reported a sharp spike in server connection problems that began around 2 p.m. Moscow time, according to monitoring websites.
Roskomnadzor said that "the attack, which caused a large-scale disruption to the operation of the applications, was repelled within an hour and the services were functioning normally again".
The regulator blamed the outage on a cyber attack targeting Russian telecommunications operators as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The goal of this attack is to force a site to go offline by flooding it with malicious Internet traffic.
The outages come as rights groups accuse Moscow of stepping up internet censorship and banning websites that publish independent information about the conflict in Ukraine.
Russia designated Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, as "extremist" in 2022 and blocked access to Meta's Instagram and Facebook sites as the Kremlin tightens its grip on the social networking space.
Authorities have also threatened to ban the popular video-sharing website YouTube, with users reporting difficulties accessing the site in Russia earlier this month. | BGNES
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