The telegram is an encrypted courier service that has recently become popular, particularly in countries with restricted speeches such as Iran and Russia.
In April, Russia asked Google and Apple to remove the Telegram app from their respective regional stores. This decision follows a court order that blocked the application for failing to provide encryption keys to agencies such as the Federal Security Service of Russia so that they could easily access user messages. Telegram attempted to circumvent the order by moving at least some of its services to different host servers.
Russia reacted by blocking more than 15.8 million IP addresses, which hindered other services such as gaming servers, banking sites, retail sites and cryptocurrency sites. According to the self-proclaimed media Meduza, the country is blocking another 50 services composed of VPNs and anonymizers on the Web in order to thwart the circumvention of radical bans.
The government agency responsible for censorship Roskomnadzor did not disclose what services she was blocking. The only thing that would confirm, is that Viber, another popular e-mail platform, would not be targeted by the embargo.
"Since April 16, the Russian authorities have blocked about 20 million IP addresses, including servers operated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Digital Ocean," says Meduza. "The Roskomnadzor crackdown has disrupted a wide range of independent online services that rely on cloud computing hosted on secure servers."
Google and Apple have not commented whether or not they will comply with requests and it is unclear what Roskomnadzor shares can take if they refuse to remove apps. Even if US giants accept Russia's wishes, users will probably find ways to get around the restrictions.
"[Despite the bans] Telegram remained accessible to most Russian Internet users using various circumvention tips," says Meduza.
According to the courier service, its application has at least 15 million users in Russia, and 10 million open the application daily. It is third only for WhatsApp (25 million users) and Viber (21 million).
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