When a National VPN Crackdown Broke the Banks: What Russia's April 3 Outage Teaches Enterprise Security Leaders
On the afternoon of April 3, 2026, shoppers in Moscow discovered their contactless payments were dead. Payment terminals at Sberbank, VTB, and T-Bank - three of Russia's largest banks - threw errors simultaneously. The Moscow metro opened its turnstiles and waved commuters through. Restaurants reverted to cash. A zoo in the south of the country briefly stopped admitting paying visitors. The outage was not a cyberattack, a cloud failure, or a ransomware event. It was the Russian telecom regulator, Roskomnadzor, trying to block VPN traffic - and accidentally blackholing IP ranges belonging to its own critical banking infrastructure.