Residents of southern Russia reported on the fighting on Telegram.

Telegram users in several southern regions of Russia reported outages in the messenger at least twice within 24 hours. Simultaneously, residents of the Southern and North Caucasian Federal Districts noticed problems with WhatsApp*.

In the afternoon of October 21, residents of southern Russia observed two noticeable outages in the popular messaging apps, Telegram and WhatsApp*.

The first outage, noticeable to many users, occurred during the day, around 2:00 PM Moscow time, and the second occurred late in the evening, between 9:30 PM and 10:00 PM Moscow time, according to data from the website DownDetector. Users reported, in particular, that messages and media files were not loading.

Most complaints about Telegram came from the Krasnodar Krai, Adygea, Volgograd, and Astrakhan Oblasts, as well as Kabardino-Balkaria and Stavropol Krai. They most often described app crashes and notification issues.

Problems accessing WhatsApp* were also localized in southern Russia – the majority of complaints came from Stavropol, Krasnodar, and Sochi. Outages were also reported in North Ossetia and the Astrakhan Oblast. The peak times for outage reports occurred around the same time as for Telegram – around 2:15 PM and around 10:00 PM Moscow time on October 21. Over half of the complaints about WhatsApp* issues related to notifications.

"Caucasian Knot" reported that access to Telegram is a persistent problem in Dagestan. In March, the republic's Minister of Digital Development, Yuri Gamzatov, announced that the Telegram messenger had been blocked and was not working in Dagestan and Chechnya. According to him, the decision was made at the federal level, based on a recommendation from law enforcement agencies, since Telegram is often used by adversaries, as exemplified by the unrest at Makhachkala airport [in October 2023]. Authorities only acknowledged the blocking of the messenger in March, although by that time, access to Telegram had been lost for several months, according to local residents. The temporary unblocking of Telegram in Dagestan on May 26 and 27, during a visit to the republic by the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, affected only some of the messenger's users in the republic, and from May 28, access to the messenger from Dagestan was again closed.