The Russian state telecommunication agency has blocked popular Telegram Messenger. Telegram is ranked in top 3 of the most popular online messengers in Russia and it has 200 million users worldwide.
According to several reports, Telegram didn’t provide keys to its encryption service to Russia’s Federal Security Service. That was leading to Telegram Ban in Russia.
Meanwhile, some users noted that Telegram is not completely blocked. Some users noted that Telegram services are still available. In near future, Russian regulator to block all IP addresses. IP addresses from Amazon Web Services (800,000), and more than a million in the 35.192.0.0/12 subnet belonging to Google’s cloud are blocked.
Some time ago, Telegram was temporarily blocked in Iran and Indonesia (Telegram is the most popular messenger in Iran).
Founder Pavel Durov noted:
The power that local governments have over IT corporations is based on money. At any given moment, a government can crash their stocks by threatening to block revenue streams from its markets and thus force these companies to do strange things (remember how last year Apple moved iCloud servers to China).
At Telegram, we have the luxury of not caring about revenue streams or ad sales. Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed
Durov doesn’t care about money as Telegram has raised $2 billion in ICO to launch its own blockchain and cryptocurrency.
