Discord not working in Russia: when and why it was blocked

Discord has not worked in Russia since autumn 2024, but not equally for everyone: in our check, the page loaded on some networks and hung on others. We go through what Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications regulator, cited, how the messenger’s status has changed, and what our checks from Russia and abroad showed.

Why Discord is not working in Russia

The problems started before the official decision. On September 27, 2024, Kommersant reported mass outages in the middle of the month: many users could open neither the web version nor the mobile app, and on September 26, according to Downdetector, more than 11,000 users in Russia reported failures. According to the newspaper, Roskomnadzor had issued five new decisions concerning the service since September 20, and the estimates cited in the article put Discord’s Russian audience at 29 to 40 million people.

On October 8, 2024, the regulator announced the restriction. As reported by Interfax, Roskomnadzor said that “access to the Discord messenger is restricted due to violations of the requirements of Russian law,” and that these requirements must be met “to prevent the messenger from being used for terrorist and extremist purposes,” for recruitment and drug sales, and because of unlawful content posted there. The same report says that in 2023 a court had fined the company 6 million rubles for failing to remove unlawful information, and that the messenger had ignored the ruling.

Discord itself wrote on its status page at the time that it was aware of reports of the service being unreachable in Russia and Turkey and that its team was investigating them. TechCrunch quoted these words on October 9, 2024.

When Discord was blocked and what happened next

• September 2024. Mass outages; from September 20, five new Roskomnadzor decisions concerning the service (Kommersant).
• October 8, 2024. Roskomnadzor announced the access restriction (Interfax).
• October 15, 2024. The regulator’s press service, according to 3DNews citing TASS: “There are currently no grounds for unblocking.”
• February 2025. A magistrate’s court in Moscow’s Tagansky district fined Discord 2 million rubles under Part 8 of Article 13.11 of the Code of Administrative Offenses for failing to meet the obligation to store and process Russian citizens’ personal data in databases located in Russia. Roskomnadzor drew up the report on January 30 (3DNews, February 5, 2025).

We found no reports of the restriction being lifted as of October 10, 2026. Our check, described below, also shows that the page does not load in three of the five home networks (as labeled by Globalping) we tested in Russia.

Checking from Russia and abroad on October 10, 2026

We requested the discord.com home page through Globalping, an open network of measurement probes. There were three runs between 17:52 and 17:54 UTC, 12 checks in total, 10 of them from Russia. One more request went out directly from our server abroad, with no VPN connection involved.

• Home networks in Russia: on a provider’s network in Tomsk (both times), with MTS in Novosibirsk (both times) and with Kursktelecom in Kursk, the secure connection was not established within 15 seconds, and no page was received. With QUARTZ TELECOM in Mar’ino, the page opened with code 200.
• Timeweb, Moscow: two checks from a point that Globalping labels as a home network, both with code 200.
• Data centers in Russia: Timeweb in Moscow and Selectel in Saint Petersburg, code 200.
• Netherlands and Germany: data centers in Amsterdam and Falkenstein, code 200.
• Our server (abroad): a direct request, code 200.

The result: out of 10 checks in Russia, 5 received the page, and all 5 failures were in home networks. Abroad, the page opened at all three points. These data cannot tell us why the page gets through in some Russian networks and not in others: the check was a small one-off, so it should not be used to judge specific operators.

What it looks like: Discord won’t open, and there is no explanation

There was no separate page announcing the block in our check. The Russian checks that did not reach the page simply waited for a response and gave up after 15 seconds. For a person, this usually looks like a long load that ends with a connection error instead of a Discord page. In September 2024, Kommersant described the same thing from the users’ side: neither the website nor the mobile app would open.

What you can try

• Tell a restriction from an outage. If other websites open, while discord.com loads for a long time and eventually shows an error, this resembles the picture from our check rather than a problem with your home internet. Discord publishes information about problems on its status page: in October 2024, a message about the service being unreachable in Russia and Turkey appeared there.
• Don’t waste time reinstalling. In our check, the connection hung before the page loaded, so clearing the cache, switching browsers or reinstalling the app is unlikely to make a difference.
• Test a foreign address. The discord.com home page opened in all three of our checks from abroad. How to do this for free is explained in the next section.

A foreign Liberum VPN location: 7 days to test it

You can try opening Discord through a foreign Liberum VPN location during the free trial: 7 days, no card needed. The choice is the Dutch, German and Georgian locations. There are no guarantees: this time we requested discord.com directly from our server and did not open it through the Liberum VPN connection. The steps: message the Liberum VPS bot, turn on the trial period, mark a foreign location, paste the subscription link into a client like Happ, connect and go to discord.com. Everyone on a location shares one address. More about the service and plans is on the home page.

What we don’t promise

• That Discord will open through our location. We did not open it while connected to Liberum VPN. In our check, the page opened from other companies’ data centers in the Netherlands and Germany and on a direct request from our server abroad.
• That login, voice channels and calls will work. We checked only the discord.com home page, not the app and not logging in to an account.
• That the connection will work on any network. Roskomnadzor restricts VPN services too: according to the regulator’s figures cited by ComNews, there were 469 of them by the end of February 2026. We explained why this happens in why VPNs stop working.
• That the restriction will be lifted soon. The latest statement by the regulator on unblocking Discord that we found says that “there are currently no grounds for unblocking” (October 2024). We make no forecasts.
• Legal assessments. What the rules say about VPNs is in our article is it legal to use a VPN in Russia; we do not assess specific situations.

Key takeaways

• Roskomnadzor restricted access to Discord on October 8, 2024; outages had begun back in September.
• In October 2024, the regulator said there were no grounds for unblocking; we found no reports of the restriction being lifted.
• On October 10, 2026, the discord.com home page did not open in 5 of 10 checks from Russia, but opened in all three checks from abroad.
• You can try a foreign Liberum VPN location for free for 7 days; the result is not guaranteed.