Telegram is widely used by the Russian political establishment, and prominent politicians and officials have openly flouted or criticised the ban. While the estimated 16m IP addresses are still a very small portion of the total number used, the effort to shut down a messaging service such as Telegram through brute force remains unprecedented. “They’ve decided the political costs of blocking Telegram and millions and millions of IP addresses used by Amazon and Google are not that high,” Soldatov said. So far, neither Amazon nor Google have commented publicly on the blocking of their hosting’s IP addresses. “Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies,” Durov, who now lives outside Russia, wrote in a message to Telegram users on Tuesday evening.

Source: The Guardian April 17, 2018 18:35 UTC