Payment system glitch in Russia caused by VPN blocking — Durov
Founder Pavel Durov stated that attempts by Russian authorities to restrict VPN services led to a massive disruption in the national payment system. According to him, tens of millions of Russians were affected by this.
This was reported by Reuters.
Durov noted that the blocking attempts did not yield the result the authorities had expected, but instead led to a massive failure.
"Their attempts to block access simply caused a massive failure in the banking system," he emphasized.
Problems with the payment system caused chaos for some shoppers. In particular, the Moscow Metro temporarily allowed people to pass through turnstiles without paying, and one of the regional zoos asked visitors to pay in cash.
In his statement, the founder of Telegram also welcomed Russians back to the "digital resistance."
"Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters. The entire nation is now mobilized to circumvent these absurd restrictions," he concluded.
As a reminder, in Russia, the requirement to block VPNs has paralyzed the IT market and threatens government contracts.
Additionally, a large-scale mobile network outage has been reported in the Belgorod region. On March 18, authorities resorted to a complete shutdown of mobile internet for the first time.
Earlier, the authorities in St. Petersburg officially announced the introduction of restrictions on mobile internet service, citing security measures as the reason.
Internet access was lost in the building of the Russian State Duma amid widespread network restrictions in Moscow.
