After Telegram moved some of its infrastructure to AWS and Google cloud, Russia banned 1.8M Amazon and Google IP addresses, impacting many other online services
Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecommunications watchdog, banned today over 1.8 million IP addresses belonging to Amazon and Google's cloud infrastructure.
Context & Ripple Effects
After Telegram shifted parts of its infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, Roskomnadzor responded not by targeting Telegram alone but by blacklisting over 1.8 million Amazon and Google IP addresses — a net so wide it catches every other service riding on those clouds. The move extends a pattern in which the regulator escalates from service-level bans to infrastructure-level ones, as later seen when Russia removed WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram from its Roskomnadzor-run directory.
The immediate cost lands on Russian users of unrelated services: within days, Google confirmed ongoing outages to Search, Gmail, and Android push notifications inside Russia. The episode also previews the pressure cloud providers themselves would face over how their infrastructure gets used, including Amazon's warning to Signal to stop domain-fronting on AWS.
First-order effects
- Russian users of any service hosted on Amazon or Google cloud lose access alongside Telegram, with Google itself confirming outages to Search, Gmail, and Android push notifications days after the ban.
- Telegram keeps operating by distributing across AWS and Google infrastructure, turning the ban into a test of whether a state can block a service that no longer owns fixed network endpoints.
Second-order effects
- Cloud providers are pushed into policing their own customers' traffic: Amazon warns Signal to stop using anti-censorship domain-fronting if it wants to stay on AWS, showing hosts absorbing censorship pressure directly.
- Google faces a compliance fork between protecting Russian users' access and appeasing Roskomnadzor — a tension that resurfaces when it reportedly pulls government-blacklisted sites from Russian search results.
Third-order effects
- If blocking entire cloud IP ranges becomes standard regulator practice, hosting on hyperscale clouds stops being censorship-neutral, and platform availability in a country depends on the provider's willingness to resist or comply.
- The escalation path runs from IP bans to directory-level platform removals and VPN crackdowns — which Russian media linked to a widespread banking outage — suggesting infrastructure-level censorship carries systemic economic blowback.
The trend: States are shifting censorship from named services to shared cloud infrastructure, forcing Amazon and Google into gatekeeper roles and making deployment sovereignty a live variable for any platform operating across borders.