Websites and apps belonging to banks, telecom operators, satellite companies, and other organizations in Russia went down on the evening of April 6, according to posts on the Telegram channel of the Russian outage-tracking service Sboi.rf (Outage.ru). The cause of the disruptions was not immediately known.
Among those affected were Rostelecom, Alfa-Bank, NTV Plus, Tricolor, Gosuslugi, T2, and Mosenergosbyt, according to the channel’s data. The Russian monitoring site Detector404.ru reported that users were also experiencing problems with Sberbank, Gazprombank, Okko, and World of Tanks.
Rostelecom’s home internet service stopped working in Moscow, according to user reports.
Sboi.rf itself also went down amid the disruptions, the Telegram channel Kod Durova noted.
The last major disruption to Russian bank services was reported three days ago, on April 3. For several hours, people in Russia were unable to transfer money, withdraw cash, or pay for purchases by card. Experts concluded that Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal censorship agency, was responsible, after which Roskomnadzor demanded that journalists remove articles making that claim.
Natalia Kasperskaya, co-founder of Kaspersky Lab and president of InfoWatch, was forced to apologize for saying that Roskomnadzor, “in a frenzy of fighting circumvention tools, had brought down half the services on the Russian internet.”
Roskomnadzor has been actively blocking Telegram in Russia in recent weeks. In late March, Russian authorities also stepped up their crackdown on VPN services.
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