Most Google services were down too, for all Russian internet users. That mean not only search, Gmail and YouTube, but less high-profile but nonetheless critical services such as CAPTCHA — the widely-used system for verifying that a log-on comes from a real human rather than a bot. With this out of action, many websites were effectively locked shut.

Services provided by other foreign online giants such as Amazon were offline too. The list went on and on. Car dealerships couldn’t process insurance payments. Passengers had trouble checking in for flights. Video-gamers were locked out of their favorite daily addiction.

In the process, Russians were also getting an insight into some of the internet’s more obscure inner workings — and how dependent they were on services outside their borders. The editor of the country’s most popular sports news site announced that they had lost all their type fonts, because the are provided and hosted externally by Google. The internet was literally disappearing in front of the eyes of Russian users.

In all, an estimated 20 million different links, websites and online services had become unavailable within Russia. Codaru.com, Coda Story’s sister website, was among them, because its hosting service was one of the sites affected.

But it wasn’t a technical failure that had caused all this online chaos. It was the Russian government — specifically its media watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor. And all because it wanted to ban a single messaging app, Telegram.

It was the culmination of a battle going back several years. The FSB, Russia’s main domestic intelligence service, has been leading the charge, accusing Telegram of giving the Islamic State and other extremists free reign to use its channels to communicate and inspire attacks.

What has really sparked the FSB’s ire, though, is the refusal of Telegram bosses to grant access to users’ communications. And when it refused to comply with a court ruling earlier this year, demanding that it hand over the necessary encryption keys, the government began its cyber-offensive to try to close the app down.

But while the Russian government is accused of all kinds of high-tech cleverness in interfering in elections and information warfare abroad, it hasn’t lived up to that image on the home front. In fact, its battle with Telegram has turned into a humiliating own-goal, making it look incompetent while also inflicting billions of rubles of losses on Russian business.

Blatant hypocrisy

Faced with a barrage of criticism and outright scorn, Roskomnadzor threw in the towel in early May and started unblocking large groups of IP (internet protocol) addresses. And after all this, Telegram itself is still available, albeit with a sometimes spotty connection.

Along the way, it has exposed the weaknesses of the Russian censorship machine, as well as the government’s blatant hypocrisy. Russian Telegram users barely make up 10 percent of its global base, but it is used by everyone of any importance in the country.

Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

When a Russian parliamentarian asked her Facebook followers not to contact her on Telegram — because the messages weren’t getting through — the spokeswoman for the Russian prime minister, Natalya Timakova, responded with a note saying they could install a VPN (a virtual private network service) to circumvent the ban, because “it’s just so easy.” She later claimed she had meant this as a joke.

Opposition channel

The story of Telegram has been one of relentless friction with the Russian government, since the app was first launched by its founder Pavel Durov. Russian lawmakers first floated the idea of banning it in 2015, on the grounds its channels were being used by the self-styled Islamic State. Durov famously retorted: “I suggest banning words. Reportedly, they are used by terrorists to communicate.”

Telegram does indeed have a history of being used by IS to recruit and train, and in at least one confirmed instance, to coordinate attacks. The FSB goes further, saying that the app has been used in almost every recent terror incident on Russian soil.

But Telegram is also the communication channel of choice for many Russian opposition groups, something that also irks the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies.

Two years ago, the government started turning up the heat. It introduced an amendment to Russia’s anti-terrorism legislation requiring any service involved in the “dissemination of information” to decrypt customer messages at the request of the FSB.

Durov refused, telling the Russian authorities that he would wipe out the extremists’ channels himself, without compromising Telegram users’ privacy.

But that did not sit well with the FSB, and the case went all the way to Russia’s Supreme Court. And in March, it ruled in the government’s favor. Durov again refused to hand over his encryption keys, and so in April Roskomnadzor began trying to block Telegram in Russia

It wasn’t so straightforward. For one thing, Russia’s online watchdog is not as powerful as you might think. It can’t block websites on its own. Instead, it is more like a go-between, following the orders of law enforcement agencies and then passing them on to internet service providers (ISPs), telling them to bar certain IP addresses.

The larger, federally-owned providers usually act on these orders immediately. Smaller, regional providers take longer though, and sometimes ignore the orders completely, which is why supposedly banned websites can remain online for hours and even days.

But Roskomnadzor compounded its own weaknesses by showing an amateurish level of understanding of how Telegram works. It is an app, not a website, which means that it is not bound to a single IP address.

Yet the online censor initially targeted it by ordering ISPs to block addresses directly associated with Telegram, including its home page and the web version of its chat service. But that did little to hamper the messenger service’s functionality. Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

For its part, Telegram immediately launched a deft campaign of counter measures — embarrassing the government still further. It sent new settings to users, allowing them to circumvent the ban, and started using a technique called “domain fronting,” which made it appear as though users were accessing entirely different services when they were actually on Telegram.

That is when the collateral damage started to spread across the Russian internet.

When Roskomnadzor realized it was being outfoxed, it reacted by ordering the cyber-equivalent of carpet-bombing, ordering ISPs to block entire subnets, or groups of IP addresses, which Telegram was using for domain fronting.

Even Russian IT giants close to the government, such as Yandex and Mail.ru, were hit. Initially reluctant to oppose the campaign against Telegram publicly, they lost patience when Roskomnadzor briefly added them to its “black list.”

The agency tried to save face by saying that it wasn’t actually attempting to ban the app, but only to “degrade” it. In fact, Telegram was actually growing, gaining thousands of new Russian users as a result of the government’s very public effort to squash it.

One of Telegram’s defining features is its “channels.” In essence, it is a simple blogging platform that allows anyone to broadcast their views and messages to an audience of their choosing. There are channels specializing in feminist writing, history and cooking, and more general political commentary groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

There are also numerous pro-Kremlin channels, both promoting government policy and attacking the opposition. Pro-Kremlin figures also run their own Telegram channels. The editor-in-chief of the government-owned RT network, Margarita Simonyan, has 13,000 subscribers, while RT Russian has almost 50,000 — and both channels have remained active even after the ban.

Telegram has also become an important advertising platform for Russian businesses, with many using popular channels to promote their products and services. So the attempt to ban the service has hit hard, causing losses estimated as high as $2 billion dollars.

The debacle has also been a blow to the government’s long-held hopes of exerting greater control over the internet. The Russian authorities have long toyed with the idea of copying the Chinese model and establishing “online sovereignty” — that is, cutting Russia off almost entirely from the global internet.

But the Kremlin was always going to struggle to achieve this, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services and author of “The Red Web,” a book on the country’s digital battles.

China built up its internet infrastructure “with total state control in mind,” he said in an interview, “while Russia only introduced content filtration in 2012.” What is more, Soldatov added, “a whole segment of China’s tech industry is aimed at controlling the online behaviour of individual users.” And all Chinese have to have a surveillance app on their phones. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory.” — Sergey Smirnov

Russia, by contrast, is using “the same age-old methods” to try to exert control on the internet, argues Soldatov. And it does not have the equivalent of China’s “Great Firewall,” with the capacity to isolate itself from the rest of the world.

Another crucial difference is that China’s domestic online market is big enough (the biggest in the world, in fact) to be almost entirely self-sufficient. While Russia has homegrown online giants such as Yandex or Vkontakte, it is still deeply dependent on outside services.

So what happens next? Anton Merkurov, an internet expert, says this is a strategic defeat for the Russian government. “The Digital Resistance [a phrase coined by Pavel Durov] did really shine while the state’s impotence couldn’t be more obvious.” As much as the government wants to censor more, Merkurov adds, they’re simply not technically competent enough to do so.

Merkurov predicts a increasing conflict between the state and what he believes is a growing community of tech-savvy individuals who reject censorship, and he says the state will lose.

But not everyone is so optimistic. Sergey Smirnov, the editor in chief of Mediazona, a crowdfunded website that covers political trials and the prison system, is wary. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory. This time they weren’t prepared from a technical standpoint, but they’ll draw conclusions for the next time.”

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For many Russians reading about the story, it was a case of “welcome to our world.”

Data harvesting is a booming and highly competitive business here, with a host of companies offering ways of “scraping” up details on your likes, shares and comments for commercial gain, with barely any regulatory or legislative control.

There are now companies offering advertisers—and anyone else who can pay—the ability to target almost any group imaginable.

For instance, one Russian online giant, Mail.ru, allows companies to target offers at married men who have a child aged 1-3, or—according to its database—the 6.5 million Russians who are “introverted.” And just like the online leverage Facebook enjoys from owning services such as Instagram and WhatsApp, Mail.ru has similar power in Russia as the owner of the two biggest domestic social media networks—Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

You can hire one of the many Russian firms specializing in “parsing” — the automated collection of social media data by bots. These bots will scour accounts across several social media networks and collect every piece of publicly available online activity, from likes, shares and comments to location “check-ins”.

One such firm is Moscow-based “Social Data Hub.” It proudly lists the Russian government as a client and boasts that it has a copy of the activity on every Russian social media network going back for the past seven years.

But their online hoovering also includes all the traffic generated by Russian-based users of U.S. and other international online giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The company also covers sites such as the Tinder dating app, and the Airbnb accommodation service. What this means in practice, for example, is that some swipes on Tinder profiles could actually have been made by bots.

Codaru.com tried out the “parsing” capabilities of one of these companies, to find out just how much they know about Russians. And it’s surprisingly cheap. For one ruble (slightly more than one U.S. cent), you get a complete copy of someone’s online profile (including their name, home region, phone number and date of birth), with a minimum order of 1000 accounts.

Tracking services also play a big role in following Russian internet users around. An estimated 80 per cent of all websites worldwide employ some kind of tracking software—tiny pieces of code embedded in the site — to monitor their visitors’ activities. The most common is Google Analytics, estimated to be present on around 50 per cent of all the websites in the world.

But Russian equivalents have a powerful hold on the domestic sphere. Yandex.Metrika, run by the country’s number 1 search engine, has a 52 per cent market share. Mail.ru’s tracking software is ranked second.

So if you search for a flight to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, say, an ad for a local hotel may pop up on your Vkontakte profile, because of the embedded tracker passing on details of your plans to other sites.

Ghostery, a browser extension that allows you to block data harvesting, reveals the true extent of online surveillance. As you read the London Observer’s exposé of Cambridge Analytica, no fewer than a dozen different trackers from three separate ad companies are watching your every click and scroll — and reporting back to their owners.

But Russians have learned recently that even if they log off social media, their online activity is still being constantly monitored— through public Wi-Fi spots.

Muscovites discovered last month that the Wi-Fi provider on the city’s huge public transport system—used by 12 million people a day—was collecting data from anyone using its routers. It could then be harvested by anyone savvy enough with the technology, according to a researcher who looked into it.

And it is taken as a given that Russia’s intelligence services have access to all online activity from any network. As one source in Russia’s data mining industry said, it’s “practically impossible” to evade mass-scale commercial surveillance.

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Chanting “Allahu akbar!” and “Buddhists are terrorists,” they denounced what they called Myanmar’s genocidal treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority - even offering themselves as volunteers to wage “jihad” on behalf of the tens of thousands now affected by the crisis. It was also an explicit challenge to the Kremlin, which has tried to block any outside intervention.

The protesters had no permit either. Yet, as several opposition activists - used to rough treatment for far lesser infringements - noted bitterly, no one was detained. The police were even quite friendly.

PUTIN’S FOOT SOLDIERS

But what made the protest most unusual was its driving force - a man seen as one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal supporters, Chechnya’s autocratic, bombastic leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He has previously called himself and other Chechens “foot soldiers in Putin’s army” — but now he is openly defying Russia’s foreign policy. And so far at least, he is meeting almost no resistance from a befuddled Moscow: unthinkable by normal Russian political standards. And the next day, Kadyrov turned up the pressure - addressing a massive rally in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. “If Russia is supporting these shaytans [devils] who are committing crimes, then I’m against Russia’s position,” said Ramzan Kadyrov in an Instagram post.

He had already trailed his views on his Instagram account (his preferred mode of global communication). In one post that was later deleted - but still available on YouTube - he openly challenged his Kremlin patrons, saying “If Russia is supporting these shaytans [devils] who are committing crimes, then I’m against Russia’s position.” In another angry diatribe, he condemned what he called the silence of “dozens of countries and human rights organizations.... in the face of untold atrocities.”

Kadyrov specifically mentioned the UN in that statement, which many interpreted as an unsubtle swipe at Russia’s diplomatic efforts to stall any international condemnation of Myanmar.

Russia has allied with China to block even the most timid statements from the UN Security Council - concerned partly about protecting lucrative trade, but also motivated by its ingrained aversion to any foreign interventions in domestic matters. Last month, Russia’s Foreign Ministry unequivocally supported Myanmar’s government, using the negative term boyeviki, or thugs, to describe Rohingya insurgents. It is a word previously used for Kadyrov’s late father and his fellow Chechen rebels, when they were fighting against Russia.

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE FRAYING

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the challenge Kadyrov is posing to the Russian leader. President Putin has allowed him unusual freedom to run Chechnya as he wants, allowing Kadyrov to turn it into a de facto independent Islamic state. But most of the time the two leaders’ agendas have coincided, with Kadyrov even acting as the Kremlin’s unofficial envoy to Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia. But now this marriage of convenience is suddenly in question. Russian TV networks barely mentioned the enormous demonstration in Grozny, and the state news agency RIA Novosti posted and then quickly removed an op-ed harshly criticizing Kadyrov.

Russia’s entire propaganda apparatus was caught completely unawares by Kadyrov’s decision to inject himself into the Myanmar crisis. State TV networks barely mentioned the enormous demonstration in Grozny, and the state news agency RIA Novosti posted and then quickly removed an op-ed harshly criticizing Kadyrov. So for now, it is clear that he still retains his political clout.

Even Putin himself attempted to tone down the extent of Kadyrov’s insubordination. Speaking at a news conference at the recent BRICS summit in China, Putin told journalists that “every person is entitled to their opinion, no matter what their status is, even if they are regional leaders.”

But Putin’s words rang hollow. Despite his ultra-loyalist past, observers see this as a sign of Kadyrov marking himself out as different - a lot more than just one of Russia’s 85 regional leaders. Instead, he appears to be casting himself as the main leader not just of Russian Muslims, but as a key player in the Islamic community worldwide - and one who can rapidly mobilize thousands of loyal supporters.

The half-hearted response to Kadyrov’s demarche shows just how much Moscow is uncomfortable with that prospect.

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