Telegram, WhatsApp messaging services disrupted in Russia

Russia said on Wednesday that the Telegram and WhatsApp messaging platforms had experienced a "large-scale failure" in the country.

A statement issued by ​​Roskomnadzor, the country's federal telecommunications monitoring service, said the large-scale failure was recorded at 2:00 p.m. local time (1100GMT).

The statement did not specify what caused the failure.

However, Roskomnadzor's press service told state news agency TASS that it had reported the failure of several services in the country, including Telegram and WhatsApp, which was caused by a DDoS attack against Russian telecom operators.

In computing, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious cyberattack that disrupts normal web traffic.

The authority said the services are now operating normally.