Russia's Telegram Ban Accidentally Breaks Its Own Banking System Instead

Russia's crusade to block Telegram and crack down on VPNs just pulled off something remarkable — it took down the country's entire banking system. Someone get these bureaucrats a lanyard and a medal for achieving maximum chaos with minimum competence.

On April 3, a nationwide outage knocked out Sberbank, VTB, and T-Bank. Card payments stopped working. ATMs went silent. Mobile banking apps crashed. Payment terminals displayed errors. The Moscow metro literally opened its turnstiles for free because the system was dead. Some shops and at least one zoo switched to cash-only. Nothing says "infrastructure resilience" quite like a zoo going full barter economy.

According to The Moscow Times, technical experts pointed fingers at Russia's VPN-blocking measures — specifically the erroneous blocking of IP addresses tied to banking infrastructure. Nice work. The government basically deployed a nuke to kill a mosquito and somehow hit their own ammunition depot instead.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov, never one to miss a moment, noted the irony: the app still has 65 million daily active users in Russia despite the full ban. Before the restrictions, Telegram had roughly 96 million Russian users, per the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The app serves as a primary news source, communication tool, and yes, even a military coordination channel for Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Nothing says "ban is working" quite like your own soldiers sliding into DMs on the forbidden app.

The Kremlin's grand plan was to funnel users to MAX, a state-backed messaging app controlled by a Gazprom subsidiary. That strategy seems to be going well. Just ask the 65 million daily users still vibing on Telegram. MAX is