Russia's attempt to crack down on VPNs on Friday 4 April took down its own banking payment network instead. According to reporting by Bloomberg, banking apps across the country stopped working, briefly making cash the only payment method nationwide. The likely cause, according to experts cited in the same reporting, was an overload in the filtering systems run by Roskomnadzor, Russia's communications watchdog. When you build infrastructure capable of choking national internet traffic on demand, you build infrastructure capable of choking the wrong traffic.
This is not the first time Russia has done this. In 2018, an attempt to block Telegram produced almost identical collateral damage. Russian internet users lost access to online payments, games, and smart home devices. Telegram lost an estimated 3 percent of its Russian audience, which given the platform's user base, means the block was roughly 97 percent ineffective at its stated goal.
The current crackdown is part of a broader campaign Russia's minister of digital development Maksut Shadayev announced in late March, framing it as an effort to reduce VPN usage. Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated on the same day as the banking outage that 50 million Russians still use Telegram daily despite years of government interference. Russia has a population of around 144 million.
What Russia Actually Wants
The VPN crackdown is not the main event. It is infrastructure clearance for a larger project. In February, Russia throttled and effectively deleted WhatsApp and Telegram from its domestic internet. The stated justification was fraud and terrorism. The timing coincided with an aggressive push to migrate users to Max, a messaging superapp developed by Russian tech company VK and launched in 2025.
Max has no end-to-end encryption. Its privacy policy explicitly states that user data is stored on servers in Russia and may be transferred to third parties, including state authorities. Cybersecurity researcher Baptiste Robert, CEO of French firm Predicta Lab, told AFP that "any data that passes through this application can be considered to be in the hands of its owner, and in this case, the hands of the Russian state." As of September 2025, Max is pre-installed on every smartphone sold in Russia by law. Schools have migrated communications with parents to the platform. Hospitals use it for patient appointments. Integration with Gosuslugi, Russia's government services portal, is planned for 2026, at which point Max becomes the only way to access government services digitally.
Researchers at Russian digital rights group RKS Global have warned that Max can detect whether a user is running a VPN on their device. The surveillance infrastructure and the censorship infrastructure are being built as a single system.
The Pattern
Russia is running a version of China's internet sovereignty model, but doing it in a country where citizens spent decades connected to the global web. China built the Great Firewall while its population was still getting online. Russia is trying to retrofit the same controls onto a population that already uses Telegram, YouTube, and WhatsApp daily, and knows what they're losing.
Blunt filtering systems at national scale create fragility across the entire network. The 2018 Telegram block took down unrelated infrastructure. The 2026 VPN crackdown took down banking. A Levada Centre poll from 2025 found a third of Russians already use a VPN. Roskomnadzor announced in January 2026 it is developing an AI-based traffic filtering system at a cost of 2.27 billion rubles, specifically to get ahead of the obfuscation techniques that keep VPN traffic invisible to its current systems. The banking outage happened while that system is still under development.
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FAQ
Why did Russia's VPN crackdown affect banking?
Roskomnadzor runs deep packet inspection filtering systems across Russia's national internet infrastructure. Experts cited by Bloomberg believe the filtering systems were overloaded during the VPN crackdown, causing banking apps to stop functioning nationwide.
Has this happened before?
Yes. In 2018, Russia's attempt to block Telegram caused widespread collateral damage including disruption to online payments, games, and smart home devices. Telegram lost an estimated 3 percent of its Russian audience despite the block.
What is the Max app?
Max is a messaging superapp developed by Russian company VK and launched in 2025. It has no end-to-end encryption, is pre-installed on all smartphones sold in Russia by law, and its privacy policy permits data to be shared with state authorities.
Can Max detect VPN usage?
Researchers at Russian digital rights group RKS Global have warned that Max can detect whether a VPN is running on the same device. They advise against using Max on any device where a VPN is also installed.
How many Russians use VPNs?
A Levada Centre poll from 2025 found approximately a third of Russians use a VPN. That figure is likely higher following the throttling of WhatsApp and Telegram in February 2026.