The administration of the WhatsApp messenger on its X social network page reacted to the removal of its domains from the records of the National Domain Name System (NDNS) — Roskomnadzor's DNS servers, created within the framework of the law on the sovereign Internet.
Only the domains whatsapp.com and web.whatsapp.com are absent in the NDNS, while the technical domain whatsapp.net and the domain for quick links wa.me remain available. For ordinary users, this means that when trying to access WhatsApp directly through the standard NDNS DNS servers, the address is not resolved to an IP, and the service becomes inaccessible without the use of workarounds.
The company stated that they will continue to do everything possible to keep users from Russia connected. WhatsApp emphasized that this is an attempt to isolate more than 100 million messenger users.
In Russia, they tried to completely block WhatsApp in an attempt to force people to switch to a state-owned application that is not protected from surveillance.
Specialized experts note that the removal of domains from the NDNS, including YouTube and WhatsApp, may be due to the need to unload the capacity of TSPU (technical means of countering threats), since restrictions on several resources at once require large computing power. At the same time, other DNS servers continue to process requests to these resources.
Against this background, the NDNS continues to record the growth of Russian users: according to the Main Radio Frequency Center, from January to July 2022, the number of unique users increased from 800 thousand to 1 million per day, and the total volume of requests amounted to about 13 billion per day, which is approximately 6% of global DNS traffic.