Viber not working in Russia: the block, your chats and your account

Chats don’t update, calls don’t connect, and the messenger’s website won’t open over either home internet or mobile data: this is how Viber has not been working in Russia for almost two years now. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications regulator, restricted access to it on December 13, 2024, and users’ questions have stayed the same ever since: why it was blocked, whether their chats will survive, whether their account will be deleted, and whether anything can be done. We answer based on official statements, Viber’s own help center and the results of a measurement we ran on October 12, 2026.

Why Viber isn’t working: what Roskomnadzor said

Interfax carried the regulator’s statement on December 13, 2024. The main reason given in it is a “violation of the requirements of Russian legislation for organizers of information dissemination.” According to RKN, these requirements exist so that terrorists and extremists, recruiters and drug sellers cannot use the messenger. The second stated reason is the “posting of unlawful information.” That same evening, a CNews correspondent confirmed that Viber worked neither over wired internet nor over mobile networks, and that the messenger’s website was unavailable.

Fines came before the block. According to Vedomosti, in June 2023 Viber was fined for the first time, 1 million rubles, “for refusing to remove false information about the special military operation,” and in March 2024 it was fined again for the same reason; the total, according to lawmaker Anton Nemkin, exceeded 1.8 million rubles. The messenger’s audience was substantial: as of November 2024, according to Mediascope data that Vedomosti cited via TASS, Viber ranked third among messengers in Russia with a reach of 26%.

What changed after the block

• January 21, 2025. Roskomnadzor added the messenger’s developer, the Luxembourg-based Viber Media S.à r.l., to the register of information dissemination organizers (ORI). Companies on this register must store information about the receipt and transmission of messages in Russia for up to a year and hand it over to security agencies on request (3DNews, citing vc.ru).
• April 30, 2025. A justice of the peace for court district No. 422 in Moscow’s Tagansky District fined Viber Media 800 thousand rubles under Part 1 of Article 13.39 of the Administrative Offenses Code for “non-fulfilment of the requirements of Russian legislation on information protection” (RIA Novosti).
• October 2026. As of October 12, 2026, we had seen no news of the restrictions being lifted, and the measurement described below showed that the viber.com home page barely responds from Russian networks.

How the Viber site responded on October 12, 2026

We queried the www.viber.com home page via Globalping (a public pool of probes for network measurements): three measurements from 22:34 to 22:39 UTC, 12 checks in total, 9 of them from Russia. We take each probe’s network type from Globalping’s labels. Our server abroad made two more requests for the page, directly and without a VPN. We made no attempt to log into the app, write messages or make calls.

Viber chats, account and backup: what happens to them

What will happen to your chats and your account is described in detail in two articles in Viber’s help center. For people whose messenger cannot connect, these rules matter:

• Uninstalling the app erases the history on your phone. If you uninstall Viber, your call and chat history disappears from the phone, while the account itself remains. Backups in Google Drive or iCloud are not touched when you uninstall.
• Two weeks to reinstall. Your account will be deactivated if, after uninstalling, you don’t reinstall Viber on your primary device within two weeks. Different time periods apply to holders of paid subscriptions such as Viber Out or Viber Plus; they are set out in the Terms of Service.
• Twelve months without logging in. An account may also be deactivated if you don’t log into Viber on your primary device for 12 consecutive months. The block in Russia has lasted more than a year; the help center doesn’t explain how Viber counts a login when the app cannot reach its servers, and we don’t know either.
• Deactivation closes the account for good. It stops working on all devices, your profile and contact list are deleted from Viber’s servers, and you are removed from groups, communities and channels. On Android, if you activate Viber again, you can restore your history from a backup in the same Google Drive account, but on iPhone, as the help center says, the account cannot be restored after deactivation.
• The backup is tied to your number. History can be restored only with the same phone number and the same Google Drive or iCloud account. It can’t be moved from Android to iPhone or the other way round.

Viber blocked: what you can do

• Don’t uninstall the app without a backup. In our measurement, the Viber site did not respond at the network level, so reinstalling is unlikely to change anything, and your chat history on the phone will be lost after uninstalling.
• Set up backups. The path in the app: “More” → “Settings” → “Account” → “Viber Backup.” There you can turn on automatic backups once a day, week or month, or create a backup manually; on Android it goes to Google Drive, on iPhone to iCloud. The help center doesn’t say whether saving works while Viber cannot connect.
• Agree on a fallback channel. There is little hope for WhatsApp and Telegram: calls in them have been under partial restrictions since August 13, 2025, WhatsApp, according to the Kremlin, has been blocked since February 2026, and RKN has been restricting Telegram as a whole since February 10, 2026; details are in our articles why WhatsApp stopped working in Russia and what is restricted in Telegram.
• Try a foreign address. A foreign IP is needed where a service refuses Russian addresses, and from abroad the Viber site responded without delay in our measurement. A free option is described below, after Viber’s rules.

What Viber’s rules say

The words “VPN” and “proxy” do not appear in Viber’s Terms of Service (the version in effect since August 18, 2026), but a few clauses are worth knowing in advance. Section 2, “Our Services,” warns: “Note that, some services may not be available in your country and are geo restricted.” Section 3 states: “We make no representation that our Services, including Viber Out, are available for use or permitted by law in any particular location,” so compliance with local laws is on the user. Section 7 forbids users to “attempt to circumvent any content-filtering techniques we employ”; this is about Viber’s own filters. Under section 12, “Viber has the right to terminate your rights under our Services without notice,” including “by blocking you, suspending or terminating your Account,” among other cases when it decides not to provide the services “in certain locations.” How, or whether, Viber enforces these clauses against people in Russia, we cannot say.

Seven days to try: a foreign Liberum VPN address for Viber

Liberum VPN has a trial period: 7 days without payment, with no bank card involved. Viber needs a foreign location: the Netherlands, Germany or Georgia. We ourselves have not launched Viber over a Liberum VPN connection, which is why we can’t promise a result; perhaps it will work for you. Proceed like this: open the Liberum VPS bot in Telegram, ask for trial access, tick one of the three foreign countries, paste the subscription link you are given into a connection app (Happ, for example, will do), switch the connection on and start Viber. The IP address at each location is shared by all customers connected to it. Prices and the service’s other features are collected on the page Liberum VPN: a VPN with foreign locations for Russia.

What we don’t promise

• That Viber will work through our location. We did not open it with a Liberum VPN connection. The Viber site responded to Globalping vantage points abroad and to our server abroad without a VPN.
• That calls and Viber Out will work. We checked a single home page of the site, not chats, calls or paid features.
• That your account is safe from suspension. Section 12 of Viber’s terms allows it to block access, suspend or terminate an account without notice.
• That your old chats will come back. Restoring from a backup is possible only with the same number and the same cloud account, and history can’t be moved between Android and iPhone.
• That the block will end soon. We have seen no reports of that, and we make no predictions.

Key takeaways

• On December 13, 2024, Roskomnadzor restricted access to Viber, citing violations of the requirements for information dissemination organizers and unlawful content.
• In January 2025 the developer was added to the ORI register, and in April 2025 a court fined it 800 thousand rubles; there were no reports of the block being lifted.
• On October 12, 2026, the viber.com site responded in only 1 of 9 checks from Russia, and from abroad in every check where the probe itself worked.
• Uninstalling the app erases chat history on the phone; without reinstalling within two weeks, or without logging in for 12 consecutive months, the account may be deactivated.
• Viber’s terms allow it to close an account without notice and not to provide services in certain locations.
• A trial of a foreign Liberum VPN location costs nothing for 7 days, but the result isn’t guaranteed.