Starting from November 18, social networks in the occupied Crimea began to report malfunctions in the Viber application, and the aggressor’s propaganda began to state that “preliminary information, it was hacked, a major leak of personal data is possible.” At the same time, Viber has not worked in recent days for illegal “mobile Internet providers” such as “Volna”, “Win mobile” and “Krymtelecom”, and among the “fixed Internet providers” problems were noted with “Optilink”, while it was reported on social networks that “the connection is restored when the VPN is turned on.”
On November 21, among other things, it was reported that “Crimea, Alushta Viber has not worked for the third day. It is impossible to find out the reason on the “official website”. It is not clear whether work will be restored in the near future.” On November 20, the application was reported not to work from Sevastopol, Feodosia, and so on. Taking into account the repeated “persistent recommendations” of the occupiers not to use this “officially not prohibited” application, as well as its technical accessibility via VPN, one can understand the current “problems” as the preparation of the occupiers to completely disable this messenger.
