Russian telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor has blocked the Viber encrypted messaging app, utilized by a whole bunch of tens of millions worldwide, for violating the nation’s laws.
“Entry to the Viber service is restricted because of the violation of the necessities of Russian laws for organizers of knowledge dissemination,” Russia’s web regulator mentioned in a press assertion.
“Compliance with the necessities is critical to stop threats of utilizing the messenger for terrorist and extremist functions, recruiting residents to commit them, promoting medicine, in addition to in reference to the posting of unlawful data.”
Viber can be utilized on each desktop and cellular platforms. As of this month, Viber for Android has been downloaded over 1 billion occasions from Google Play Retailer, whereas its iOS counterpart has over 744,000 scores on Apple’s App Retailer.
This comes after a Moscow court docket ordered Viber to pay a 1 million robles high-quality in June 2023 for failing to take away what Russia described as unlawful content material, together with data on Russia’s warfare in Ukraine.
In March 2023, Russia banned authorities and state businesses from utilizing a number of overseas non-public messaging functions, together with Discord, Microsoft Staff, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
In August of this yr, Roskomnadzor additionally restricted entry to the Sign encrypted messaging service for violating Russian anti-terrorism and anti-extremism laws.
A number of digital non-public community (VPN) apps had been additionally banned in three waves: one in January 2020, one in June 2021, and the latest in December 2021.
Apple was additionally pressured to take away 25 VPN apps (together with NordVPN, Proton VPN, Pink Protect VPN, Planet VPN, Hidemy.Identify VPN, Le VPN, and PIA VPN) from the Russian App Retailer in August 2024 on the request of Roskomnadzor as a result of they had been used to entry “unlawful content material.”
A Viber spokesperson was not instantly out there for remark when contacted by BleepingComputer earlier immediately.
