Wait, What? Roskomnadzor knocks down its own site in hunt for Telegram

Russia’s steps to block access to Telegram have seemingly reached absurd levels. After blocking millions of IP addresses related to Google and Amazon cloud services (something that severely affected small businesses, basic local online services, and even cash transactions in some cases), it’s now coming to light that Roskomnadzor’s (Russia’s state telecom regulator, equivalent of US FCC) own website is currently down.

Multiple users are pointing this out on social media:

https://twitter.com/Oleksiy__/status/986378897901076482
https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/status/986275242141192192
https://twitter.com/_socialcapital_/status/986354707663851520
https://twitter.com/di_halt/status/986347384971104256
https://twitter.com/mr_adoptive/status/986345773402148865
https://twitter.com/cobazlo/status/986392852639789057

We tried accessing http://rkn.gov.ru/ from our computers (in India), but it didn’t load. Then we turned to different down detector websites, and found that most of them concluded the site is down, as it could not be accessed from majority of access points around the world.

Here are a couple of examples of why we’d call all this mess a snafu:

1.
https://twitter.com/Alexey__Kovalev/status/986320643602944000

2. A new report out of Russia says that now Volvo Russia and Gett Taxi services are both down doe to the Telegram crackdown.

And here’s why it’d be very difficult for Russia to completely block Telegram:

There’s currently no official word by Roskomnadzor on all this mess. What Roskomnadzor’s chief recently said is:

We identify the IP addresses where the messenger is migrating and are blocking them

Adding that this is a

battle between munitions and armor

More info:

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