This has been reported 24 Channels Referring to the Russian opposition publication “Agentstvo.Novyny”.

What is known about Viber failures in Russia

According to Russian journalists, the first reports of the Viber malfunction appeared after midnight on December 1, as Downdetector service data shows.

Downdetector recorded the largest number of complaints about the failure of the messenger at nine in the morning Moscow time. After that the number of reports of problems decreased, but even at 17.00 the Russians continued to complain about the failure.

There is a large-scale failure in the work of Viber / Photo from the telegram channel “Agentstvo.Novyny” in Russia.

In addition, as noted by journalists, the website “Sboy.rf” recorded about 4.5 thousand complaints per day about the work of Viber. Also, according to the service, Russians reported malfunctions in Telegram (682 complaints) and WhatsApp (617 complaints).

In particular, Viber users complained about problems receiving and sending messages, as well as the inability to use the mobile application, the site and the user’s personal account, as Downdetector data shows.

Moscow, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Ulyanovsk, Tyumen, Saratov, Sverdlovsk, Orenburg and Volodymyr regions, St. Notifications of Viber malfunction were received from St. Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Perm and Trans-Baikal regions.
Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Udmurtia and Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region.

The most active complaints about Messenger problems occurred in Transbaikalia (15% of the total number of complaints), Buryatia (12%) and the Irkutsk region (8%).

The seriousness of Viber’s problems is evidenced by the fact that mass media in the regions drew attention to this problem, and in Buryatia school chats and chats of additional educational circles began to be transferred to the educational platform Telegram and Sferum.

What might have caused problems with Viber’s operations in Russia?

The most likely reason for the failure was the activation by the authorities of the “anti-message” internet service restriction mode, which was reported to journalists by the “Na zvyazka” technical support service.

This is one of the modern point methods of limiting communications in cases where other services are practically not affected. Data messengers use proxy servers. Each server has its own address and they are blocked only by IP. Therefore, applications cannot reach these servers to send or receive messages.
– experts explained.

In favor of this version, the representative of “In Contact” explained that failures were observed only in the work of newsmen. Viber itself has not yet commented on the failure of the application in Russia.

Interestingly, the last large-scale Viber outage was recorded at the end of October 2024.