Russia experienced a strange internet outage on Tuesday, with popular local networks such as Telegram and VKontakte experiencing massive outages, while banned social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram partially returned online, Reuters reported, citing Agerpres .

Russia’s public communications network monitoring center said on Tuesday that its experts had detected a “massive outage” of Telegram, the country’s most popular messaging app and the channel many Russian officials prefer to send their messages to the public. Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reuters correspondents in Moscow observed Telegram, YouTube and Vkontakte outages for about 90 minutes.

“The work of the Telegram messenger and a number of other services in Russia has already been restored,” the Russian Ministry of Digitalization said in a statement, adding that the application was also out of order outside of Russia.

“Together with Roskomnadzor, we are working to establish the cause of the incident,” the message reads.

“Terrorist” platforms are working again in Russia

But shortly after the trouble began, Reuters correspondents in Moscow reported that several banned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, suddenly returned to a network that Russian users had not been accessing to hide their IP address through a VPN service.

The authorities in Moscow have blocked Russian access to these two social media platforms since March 2022, just a month after the start of the war in Ukraine, after declaring Meta, which owns them, a “terrorist organization”.

Although WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Meta, can still be used in Russia, authorities have issued several fines for it. Earlier in February, a Moscow court announced the arrest in absentia of Andy Stone, a representative of the company Meta Platforms, founded and managed by Mark Zuckerberg.

Russia’s Interior Ministry opened a criminal case against Stone last year, but did not disclose the charges against a representative of the American company.

However, on Monday, the court of the Basmanny district of Moscow said that he was charged with “propaganda of terrorist activities, public calls to commit terrorist acts, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism, public calls for extremist activities.”

A Russian official says it’s wrong to blame the state for Internet problems

Moscow has long sought to improve its domestic Internet infrastructure, or Runet, even disconnecting from the global Internet for tests.

Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the State Duma parliamentary commission on information policy, said it was unclear what caused Telegram’s outages, but it was a mistake to immediately blame the Russian state, citing “conspiracy theories” that Russia was trying to block foreign resources before the presidential election in March. .

“Such incidents have been and will be for various reasons: from human error to hacker attacks,” he said. “Much more important is how long it will take to fix the defect; The extent of damage to the Russian economy depends on this,” he added.