On April 3, 2026, the Russia woke up with a banking system on its knees. Applications of Sberbank, VTB And T-Bank cut off, payment terminals mute, ATMs blocked. In Moscow, the metro opened turnstiles for free, while a regional zoo asked visitors to bring cash.
This chaos was not due to a foreign cyberattack, but to an internal censorship operation. By trying to tighten the blocking of VPNs, the communications regulator Roskomnadzor mistakenly affected the banking infrastructure. A technical offensive that has transformed into digital self-sabotage across the country.
Blocking VPNs in Russia: How a censorship test paralyzed banks
For months, the Kremlin has been leading a crusade against VPNs, software that encrypts traffic and sends it through other countries to circumvent censorship. In January 2026, Roskomnadzor had already blocked more than 469 VPN services, an increase of 70% compared to the previous fall. In February, Telegram And WhatsApp were removed from the Russian network to push users towards Maxan official super-app managed by a subsidiary of Gazpromwithout real confidentiality protection.
In March, the Minister of Digital Maksut Shadayev announced a plan to “reduce the use of VPNs”. On April 1, new technical and financial restrictions came into force. Two days later, the filters of Roskomnadzor were overloaded and IP addresses linked to banks were mistakenly blocked, causing the general outage. According to Fyodor Muzalevskytechnical director of RTM Group, these blocking measures most likely contributed to the incident.
Why did VPN blocking affect Sberbank, VTB and the entire Russian payment system?
Concretely, blocking VPNs means massively filtering IP address ranges and network protocols used by these services. Problem: these same technologies are also used to connect data centers, business networks and banking systems. By overfiltering, control equipment can cut off critical flows, such as those connecting mobile applications to the heart of the payment system.
Immediate result: for several hours, cash once again became the only reliable means of payment in one of the world’s top ten economies. “Telegram was banned in Russia, but 65 million Russians still use it every day thanks to VPNs. The government spent years trying to block VPNs too. Their attempts to block them caused a massive banking outage. Cash briefly became the only means of payment throughout the country,” wrote Pavel Durov on his channel Telegram.
This is not a first. As early as 2018, an attempt to block Telegram had already led, according to the Moscow Times, to “major disruptions to online payments, games and even connected homes”, for only 3% of audience lost for the application. Eight years later, the same pattern repeats itself, but the indirect target has become the entire banking system.
Bank failure, economic losses: can Russia’s Internet strategy hold?
Russian companies have escalated their anger to Vladimir Putin. For Moscow’s economy, five days of disruption would have cost between 3 and 5 billion rubles, or around 32 to 54 million euros. A heavy price for a control operation which has neither made VPNs disappear nor removed the 65 million daily users of Telegram.
Pavel Durov evokes a “Digital Resistance” and promises to continuously adapt its messaging traffic to make it more difficult to detect and block, as in Iran where the same restrictions have especially popularized VPNs. Unlike the Chinese “Great Firewall”, built gradually, the Russia tries to copy this model in haste. This massive banking failure shows a clear limit: beyond a certain point, technical control of the Internet begins to directly threaten the economic stability of the country.