Russia's economy could lose 1 billion dollars by the end of the year, because of the Telegram ban

The “software solutions” company Flexbby estimates that the collateral damage to the Russian economy caused by Roskomnadzor’s efforts to block Telegram will reach $1 billion within a few months. Flexbby says the blocking of millions of IP addresses has disrupted the work of roughly 400 Russian companies that use various cloud services offered by Google and Amazon.

Since the federal censor started blocking access to servers used by Telegram, Russian businesses have experienced outages in online storage, geolocation, e-payments, bank services, AI systems, mobile apps, customer service, and more. Additionally, Google and Amazon are apparently on track to lose as much as $940 million by the end of the year.

Ordinary Russian Internet users have also experienced widespread outages of Google’s popular online services, reporting disruptions to products like Gmail, YouTube, and more. The Russian Association of Motor Insurers and Russian Postal Service have complained that reCAPTCHA, which detects bots accessing their websites, has been failing and interrupting their own customer services.