The Kremlin has tried to steer people to a state-backed alternative known as MAX, which was created by the state-controlled company VK, and some fear it could be used for surveillance.
Moscow residents reported that the mobile internet outages in the capital appeared to worsen nearer the center, although they have since improved.
Lera said that she had problems using her bank card to pay for meals in the center of the capital and that staying in touch with loved ones had proved tricky. “I didn’t realize there was no internet, and my relatives thought something had happened to me,” she said.
She added that she suspected the outages are not about security but that they are, instead, part of a bigger ploy by the Russian government “to cut us off from the internet, prevent our people from communicating and force us to use the government messenger.”
Alexandra, a media worker, said she had encountered problems loading videos and media files on Telegram, which she circumvented by using a virtual private network — one of the only ways Russians can access censored content online.
“Everything worked great for me,” she said in an audio message.
Her experience appears to be increasingly rare, as the Russian business newspaper Kommersant estimated in a report last week that just five days of outages caused 3 billion to 5 billion rubles ($37 million to $62 million) in damages to Moscow businesses.
Courier services, taxis and car-sharing and retail businesses were among the most affected by the outages, it said, quoting a beauty salon manager who said he had had to ask customers to pay with cash because card machines were not working without mobile internet on people’s phones. The president of an association of fitness clubs also told the paper that people were used to doing everything online and had “stopped picking up the phone.”
The Russian news outlet RBC also reported increased demand for walkie-talkies, pagers, landline phones and paper maps.
