Telegram blocked in Russia, to be removed from App Store

The Tagansky court has granted Roskomnadzor full permissions to blacklist Telegram. Here’s how you can access the app again in Russia.

Telegram to be removed from the App Store

After a lot of back and forth between Telegram and Roskomnadzor, Russia has finally banned Telegram.

For the uninitiated, Russia Russia introduced new anti-terrorism laws back in 2016. Telegram failed to comply with this law as usual because of its ultra-strong message encryption.

Despite repeated requests by the government, developers refused to share the message decryption keys to the authorities.

This didn’t go down well with the internal security service and they decided to block the app altogether.

Telegram

The ban is currently being rolled out at a slow but steady pace. Users are reporting outages in almost all big cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc. Russian carriers will also block its official website very soon.

Here’s what CEO Pavel Durov has to say about this blockade.

Surprinsgly, this ban is not permanent. If the government receives the decryption keys in the future, they will unblock it.

Blockades on internet-based apps and services are nothing new in Russia. Previously, LinkedIn was banned in the Russian Federation on similar grounds.

How can you unblock Telegram?

Though Telegram is now officially banned, Russian users can still access the secure messaging app with simple workarounds.

The most effective solution is to use a VPN app that will spoof your location. Alternatively, you can also use the in-app “Proxy” section to manually change your location.

I suggest following this tutorial to fully unblock Telegram on your device.

The inbuilt bypass mechanism can circumvent almost all blocks by the government. However, this does not guarantee 100% uptime in the event of a complete ban.

How do you plan to tackle this ban? Let us know in the comments below.

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