Russia block some of services Google in connection with Telegram cases

Entrepreneur Pavel Dirov is pushing Russian society today to fly a paper plane without message to the skies of Moscow and other cities in the country, in support of the Russian government allowing Telegram's social media network. As we know, telegram uses paper plane as its icon.

The messaging app that Dirov founded, was blocked last week by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN). According to RKN the services provided by Telegram violate national law, as it does not provide them with an encryption key to access messages on the service. Telegram has also refused to comply with the Russian regulator's wishes.

Shipping or flying the symbol paper airplane from the flashmob in "Digital Resistance" -this is the preferred term Durov - most of which has been played online. Now nearly 18 million IP addresses are disconnected from being accessed in Russia, all in order to block Telegram.

And in the latest developments, Google has also ensured that its services are now affected. It appears that Google Search, Gmail, and push notifications for Android apps, are affected Google products.
"We are aware of reports that some users in Russia can not access some Google products, and are investigating the report," a Google spokeswoman responded to a question via email. Google finally replied to a question about the Telegram blockade, and this is the first time the company has replied and acknowledged anything related to it.

Google comments submitted related to RKN policy, which today also announced that it has expanded its IP block to Google services.

RKN has blocked nearly 19 million IP addresses, with dozens of third party services that also use Google Cloud and Amazon AWS, such as Twitch and Spotify, also stuck in a firefight.

To note, Russia is one of the countries in the world, which implements a sort of digital firewall, blocking certain online content on a regular or permanent basis. Under that policy, some people turn to VPNs to be able to access that content. While Telegram, it does not need to depend on the solution to get used to.

"RKN is very bad in blocking Telegram, so most people still use it without intermediaries," said Ilya Andreev, COO and founder of Vee Security, which has provided proxy services to pass the ban.

 This is why many IP addresses are blocked, because Telegram has used a technique that allows it to "jump" to a new IP address when its use is blocked from being accessed by RKN. This is a technique used by a much smaller app, Zello, also used for almost a year when RKN announces its own ban.

Zello stopped its activities earlier this year when RKN acted wisely on the Zello way and chose to start blocking all subnets of IP addresses to avoid so many jumps, and Amazon AWS and Google Cloud cordially asked Zello to stop because other services also started being blocked.