Russia Threatens to Block WhatsApp ‘Completely’ Amid Outages in Major Cities

Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor once again threatened to block WhatsApp in Russia on Friday, accusing the Meta-owned messaging service of enabling terrorism against Russia.

The statement comes after widespread reports from within Russia that WhatsApp was jammed in major Russian cities on Friday, as well as Siberia and the Urals the previous day.

According to AFP, Roskomnadzor claims that WhatsApp is being used to “organize and carry out terrorist acts in the country, to recruit perpetrators, and for fraud and other crimes against our citizens.”

“If the messenger fails to comply with Russian legislation, it will be completely blocked.”

Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, is already banned in Russia – designated as an “extremist” organization by authorities after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In August, however, Roskomnadzor also imposed restrictions on Telegram, the country’s other most popular messaging service.

The restrictions sparked concerns that Moscow is trying to force Russian users into switching to Russian messaging service Max, a Kremlin-approved alternative that – unlike WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted – shares customer data with Russian law enforcement.

This latest crackdown on WhatsApp follows a scandal caused by Bloomberg’s publication of leaked telephone conversations between US Special Envoy to Ukraine Steve Witkoff and senior Russian diplomat Yuri Ushakov.

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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte issued a stark appeal to young Russians not to fight in the war in Ukraine, saying they will be sent to the front with poor training, bad equipment and a high chance of being killed, wounded or abandoned. He backed his warning with NATO estimates that Russia is losing more than 30,000 soldiers a month – more in a single month than the Soviet Union lost during its entire 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Ushakov denied that he or Witkoff had leaked the telephone conversations, which revealed that Witkoff had coached Kremlin officials on how to gain US President Donald Trump’s support for a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine which Russian officials reportedly helped draft.

Speaking to Russia’s state media, Ushakov said that some of the phone conversations had been held over WhatsApp, which he claimed must have been hacked (Meta denies this.)

Meta has yet to comment on Rozkomnador’s Friday statement.