The Kremlin appears to be blocking Telegram. Meduza asked its Russia-based readers how well the crackdown is working.
Late last week, many Telegram users in Russia began reporting serious disruptions, according to outage trackers Downdetector and Sboy.rf. Reports that Russian authorities planned to permanently block the popular messaging app in early April had been circulating for some time. But according to industry experts, the process may have begun two weeks ahead of schedule.
The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that the share of failed requests to Telegram domains from within Russia has reached nearly 80 percent. That figure doesn’t necessarily reflect how many users have actually lost access. So Meduza set out to check in the simplest way: by asking our Russia-based readers how well Telegram is working for them — and what they plan to do if it stops altogether. Here’s what we learned.
An overwhelming majority of our Russia-based readers reported problems with Telegram: 88 percent of the 7,439 people who responded to our survey said the app doesn’t function properly. For 17 percent, it doesn’t work at all. For the largest share — 46 percent — it still runs, but slowly and unreliably.
Another quarter say the issues come and go. But for an app meant to keep people connected, even intermittent failures can feel almost like a full block.
To get around restrictions, most respondents rely on VPNs (76 percent). A smaller group (11 percent) uses proxy servers, while just 4 percent say they’re ready to give up and switch to platforms that aren’t blocked.
Among those who responded, 93 percent already use a VPN to access Telegram. Only 1.6 percent say they neither use nor plan to use one; everyone else is simply putting it off.
Even so, not everyone with a VPN uses it specifically for Telegram. About 17 percent still access the app directly, suggesting that restrictions haven’t fully reached roughly one in six users.
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For many of our Russian-language readers, Telegram is central to daily life. Forty-three percent say “their whole life is on Telegram,” making it hard to single out a single primary use for the app. About half say they use it more now than they did a few years ago.
Respondents primarily use Telegram as a messaging tool: 28 percent say they use it to communicate with friends and family, compared to just 16 percent who see it mainly as a news source.
At the same time, when it comes specifically to news, Telegram still dominates: 60 percent prefer it over traditional media (16 percent). Facebook and Instagram barely register, with only about 1 percent of respondents relying on each.
If Telegram is fully blocked, Meduza readers are unlikely to move to the Kremlin-backed “national messenger” app Max — but they haven’t settled on an alternative. The most common answer to the question of where to go next was simple: “definitely not Max.”
Beyond that, there’s no clear frontrunner. Many respondents haven’t seriously considered alternatives yet and plan to do so only if workarounds stop working.
