Russia Bans 1.8 Million Amazon and Google IPs in Attempt to Block Telegram

Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecommunications watchdog, banned today over 1.8 million IP addresses belonging to Amazon and Google's cloud infrastructure.

The following IP blocks have been reported as banned in Russia at the ISP level. The IP ranges account for 1,835,008 IPs.

52.58.0.0/15
18.196.0.0/15
18.194.0.0/15
18.184.0.0/15
35.156.0.0/14
35.192.0.0/12

[Inline update: Te number of blocked IPs has now reached over 16 million. New domains and IP ranges have been added today, April 17, to Russia's national blocklist. Newly banned domains and IPs can be tracked via this GitHub repository. We will not be keeping the above list up-to-date. Please refer to the GitHub repo instead.]

The move to ban these IP blocks is a response to Telegram moving some of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud servers over the weekend.

Roskomnadzor banned the Telegram instant messaging client inside Russia's border on Friday, April 13, after Telegram refused to hand over customers' encryption keys to the FSB, Russia's main intelligence service.

By moving servers to Amazon and Google servers, Telegram was able to skirt the initial ban and provide service to Russian users over the weekend.

Many users ridiculed Roskomnadzor's decision on social media, and for good reasons, as the move to mass-ban so many IP addresses had secondary repercussions, as it also blocked many legitimate web services. Users reported many online games, mobile apps, and cryptocurrency services going dark over the course of the day.

Telegram started using Amazon's AWS to bypass Russian censorship. Now, if you were @roscomnadzor (highly unlikely because nobody's as dumb as these doorknobs), what would you do? Certainly not block 655352 IP addresses belonging to Amazon, right? That would be so stupid... oh pic.twitter.com/AxEHfRUGnU

— Manual (@CatVsHumanity) April 16, 2018

So our blessed government blocked a bunch of Amazon IP addresses because they were used to circumvent the block on the Telegram messaging app. As a result, a whole bunch of MMOs and other multiplayer games using Amazon IPs stopped working. Idiocy still reigns supreme.

— The Old Man From Scene 24 (@Ariurotl) April 16, 2018

They've already blocked 2 millions of Amazon IPs, 1 million Google IPs and this is not the end. But the most funny in this mess that Telegram is still working without using VPN or Proxy...

— MashaSG (@MashaSnG) April 16, 2018

And these addresses include a lot of Amazon and Google services that sustain work of thousands of sites and other services that have nothing to do with the @telegram. How far our dumb-ass idiots in @roskomnadzor_rf can go?

— Ilya Lobanov (@vismarcheg) April 16, 2018

Oh wait, Telegram still works in Russia but Viber and Amazon doesn't...

— Nelly (@Larakagi) April 16, 2018

So, Telegram is officially banned in Russia now. To enforce this ban our government blocked over 2 million ip addresses today, mainly from Amazon AWS and Google subnets.
What a time to be alive.

— Rannor Medved (@rannor_ru) April 16, 2018

Dear users, due to the blocking of @telegram on the territory of Russia Roskomnadzor blocked more than 2 million ip addresses of the Amazon company where our servers are included, perhaps the Coinface application will temporarily not be available in Russia.

— Coinface (@coinfaceme) April 16, 2018