Russia begins blocking the messenger Signal

Update: Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, has confirmed that it is now blocking Signal for “violations of Russian legislation, the compliance with which is necessary to prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist purposes.”

Signal messenger users across Russia have reported service disruptions, according to the monitoring websites Sboy.rf and Downradar. The independent news outlet iStories was the first to highlight the outage, which began on the morning of Friday, August 9. Users have said the messenger doesn’t function without a VPN or enabling the service’s bypass mode. iStories reports that the Russian authorities have likely started blocking Signal. Mikhail Klimarev, the director of the Internet Protection Society and author of the Telegram channel ZaTelecom, writes that Russia started blocking Signal on August 8.

At the time of this writing, the Russian authorities have not officially acknowledged any regulatory actions against the Signal messenger service.

Earlier this week, Russia’s media censor unofficially escalated its throttling of YouTube desktop playback to a near-total block on all YouTube traffic.

Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers in the world. The service uses end-to-end encryption for calls, messages, and file exchanges, protecting correspondence from interception by mobile operators and police. Additionally, the messenger collects and stores minimal user data compared to other services.