November 01, 2023

No Telegram Today


No Telegram Today
Telegram. Yuri Samoilov, Wikimedia Commons.

On October 30, Russia experienced a Telegram blackout after a group of protesters in Dagestan surrounded an airplane from Israel, an antisemitic attack that was organized on the social media site.

According to Down Detector, 84 percent of users of the messaging platform in Russia reported Telegram was not working. Others have complained of problems with the app and delays in receiving messages.

Down Detector also showed that most complaints came from southwestern Russia and Moscow. "Ostorozhno Novosty" ("Attention, News") later reported that residents of the North Caucasus, Dagestan in particular, said Telegram wasn't working, especially for downloading pictures and videos. Users were only able to open the app using a VPN or proxy. According to the "Telegram Info" channel, had the outage been a technical failure, it would not have been possible to use a VPN. 

"Utro Dagestan" ("Morning Dagestan"), associated with a former Duma legislator exiled in Ukraine, Ilya Ponomaryov, was the Telegram channel that shared the most information about the flight from Tel Aviv and fueled the violence.

 

 

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