Durov Announced The Beginning Of The "digital Resistance"

• 4.04.2026, 10:18

The founder of Telegram addressed the Russians.

In his official TG channel, the founder of messenger Telegram Pavel Durov issued a statement that reads, "Welcome back to the Digital Resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters."

Durov said that at the moment in Russia, despite the blockades, 65 million people in that country still use the messenger daily via VPN (virtual private network). Of those, more than 50 million send messages every day.

"The government has also been trying to ban VPNs for years. Their attempts to block them simply caused a massive banking crisis - yesterday, cash briefly became the only way to pay across the country," Pavel Durov wrote.

He recalled that in another country, Iran, the authorities had already tried to block Telegram. However, this led to the fact that the Iranians in their masses switched to the use of VPNs in order not to be left without communication through an independent messenger.

"Now to 50 million participants of the Digital Resistance in Iran joined more than 50 million in Russia," - stated Pavel Durov.

"Now the whole nation is mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions. Thousands of people are creating VPNs and proxies. From our side, we will continue to adapt - making Telegram's traffic even harder to detect and block," the Telegram founder promised.

In the meantime, a beta version of the messenger has appeared online, where the messenger restores blocked proxies.

The developers fixed an old bug that could cause TSPU (Technical Threat Countermeasures) to cut off the messenger's connection with proxies. Now the program hides proxies from traffic filtering equipment.