Telegram founder Pavel Duvrov blames Russia's VPN blocking attempt for major payment issue — ‘Massive banking failure’

Telegram founder Pavel Duvrov on Saturday lashed out at Russia, saying that Moscow's attempt to block Virtual Private Networks triggered a problem with a domestic payment system.

Taking to Telegram, the founder said that tens of millions of Russians were now moving to resist the digital controls their country has imposed.

Russia saw a major payment issue on Friday as shoppers faced disruptions. Moscow metro was forced to allow entry without payment through its turnstiles, while a regional ​zoo had to ask visitors to ​use cash.

“Telegram was banned in Russia — yet 50M+ Russians still use it daily via VPNs. The government has spent years trying to ban VPNs too. Their blocking attempts just triggered a massive banking failure — cash briefly became the only payment method nationwide,” Duvrov wrote on Telegram, as well as on X.

He said that Russians continue to use Telegram despite the ban on the app.

“For accuracy, over 50M Russians send at least one message every day, with 65M daily active users in Russia overall despite the ban. Monthly active users remain to be seen, but could easily be twice as high,” he said.

He called the move of Russians to use Telegram despite the ban a ‘digital resistance’.

“Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters. The entire nation is now mobilised to bypass these absurd restrictions.”

Moscow hit by major payment failure

On Friday, Russian shoppers were hit with a major payment issue, with shoppers and commuters failing to pay online.

The cause of the payment system problem was not immediately clear but shoppers and retailers said that they experienced problems with Sberbank, the country's biggest bank, and with payments with QR codes.

While the problem was resolved, Sberbank did not provide a reason as to why it happened.

The outage came at a time when Russia has increasingly made efforts to block the usage of popular apps and even restricted the use of VPNs.

Not just Sberbank, other Russian institutions, including T-Bank and VTB, reported similar problems.

Downdetector, the outage monitoring servie, data suggested a spike in outages across the Russian banking sector on Friday morning.

The outage was first reported at around 10 am Moscow time with mobile banking apps, payment transfers, and ATM withdrawals facing issues.

Shops and petrol stations asked customers for cash for about an hour on Friday, citing a problem with payment systems, a Reuters report said.

The Moscow metro turnstiles let people enter for free at one point, TASS reported. A zoo in Belgorod said card payment systems were down, and asked visitors to pay cash.

National Payment Card System (NSPK), the payment system overseen by Russia's central bank, said that the issue was caused due to a technical failure at “one of the banks”.

"There may be short-term difficulties in processing bank card operations or the cancelation of such operations. The situation does not affect the safety of funds," the NSPK said in a statement.

Pavel Duvrov's statement may have been the first such official statement on the real cause of the incident.