Russian authorities prepare to block Discord

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, has issued five decisions on violations of Russian legislation concerning the messenger app Discord.

Source: Latvia-based Russian media outlet Meduza

Details: Meduza suggests that this will soon lead to a slowdown or complete blocking of the Discord service in Russia, meaning that tens of millions of people will lose another convenient means of communication.

Discord is used in education and business as well as for communication.

According to various estimates, the number of registered Discord users in Russia ranges from 29 to 40 million.

Over the past month, Russian Discord users have experienced problems with the service on at least three occasions. A large-scale outage in August prevented many other popular websites and apps from opening in addition to Discord, including Telegram, WhatsApp and Steam.

Roskomnadzor attributed this to a DDOS attack on Russian telecoms operators. Experts have suggested that the Russian authorities were primarily trying to block Telegram, but their actions affected other programs and websites too.

On 18 September, Discord stopped working in various regions of Russia. Some users were able to regain access using a VPN connection. The latest outage was recorded on 26 September, when users complained that neither the website nor the app was working.

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