Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov announced an update to the messenger's protocol and urged Russian users to immediately install the new version of the application — according to him, it is resistant to blocking.
Access problems are already being recorded today: according to the detector404.ru monitoring service, 389 complaints have been received in the last hour, and about 2.8 thousand in the last day. Failures are noted in 34 cities, the peak of requests occurred in the morning. Most often, the mobile application does not load, messages do not open, and access to the service disappears altogether.
In total, from March 20 to April 12, 9.4 thousand Russians complained about problems, according to Downdetector.
The daily audience of Telegram in Russia, as of April 4, remains at the level of 65 million people.
The slowdown began on February 10 after official confirmation from Roskomnadzor; RBC sources called the beginning of April as a possible date for a complete blocking. According to monitoring services, the availability of the application has reached minimum values.