Russia attributes Telegram, WhatsApp outage to cyberattack

Messaging services Telegram and WhatsApp briefly suffered a major outage in Russia on Wednesday, said the country's media regulator Roskomnadzor, which blamed a cyberattack.

Users from both platforms reported a spike in server connection issues beginning around 2 pm Moscow time (1100 GMT), according to monitoring websites.

Roskomnadzor said the "attack" that caused "large-scale disruption" to the apps services was repelled within an hour and service was again operating normally.

The regulator blamed the outage on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattack targeting Russia's telecom operators.

A DDoS attack is designed to force a website offline by overloading it with malicious internet traffic.

The outages come as rights groups accuse Moscow of ramping up internet censorship, banning websites that carry independent information about the Ukraine conflict.

Russia labelled WhatsApp's parent company Meta "extremist" in 2022 and has blocked access to Meta sites Instagram and Facebook as the Kremlin tightens control over the social media sphere.

Authorities have also threatened to ban popular video sharing site YouTube, with users reporting difficulties in accessing the site in Russia earlier this month.