Russia weighs Google Meet ban as part of foreign tech crackdown

A senior Russian official said the government is considering blocking the video conferencing service Google Meet after brief disruptions in the country late last week.

Andrei Svintsov, the deputy chairman of the State Duma’s IT committee, said Western apps deemed a threat to national security could eventually be banned.

“Applications that can spy on our citizens and send information to Western intelligence services may well be blocked,” Svintsov told local media while commenting on the recent Google Meet outages, adding that the service has not been banned yet.

The monitoring service Downdetector registered more than 2,300 complaints on Friday about Meet’s performance, with users reporting frozen calls, missing video and audio, and the app shutting down. Access was later restored. Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Russia’s internet regulator Roskomnadzor denied it had restricted Meet. Svintsov suggested the failures may have been caused by an influx of users after Russia restricted calls on WhatsApp and Telegram earlier this month.

Independent journalists and digital rights experts said a ban on Meet was likely as the Kremlin moves to promote Max, a state-backed messaging app developed by VKontakte founder Pavel Durov’s successor team and modeled on China’s WeChat. Starting in September, Max will be pre-installed on all new smartphones sold in Russia.

Earlier this month, Moscow blocked voice and video calls on WhatsApp and Telegram, accusing the U.S.-based apps of enabling fraud, sabotage and terrorism. Authorities said the services could be restored if the companies complied with demands to share data with Russian law enforcement.

WhatsApp, which is owned by the tech giant Meta, called the decision to restrict calls in its app an attempt to strip Russians of secure communications and push them toward “less secure services to enable government surveillance.”