Service Outages Reported by Sberbank and Other Banks

Sberbank, the largest bank in Russia, announced on Friday that customers from several other major banks, including VTB and T-Bank, experienced similar service disruptions.

Starting around 10 a.m. Moscow time, Sberbank users reported difficulties with payments and transfers. Some faced challenges withdrawing cash from ATMs or using their banks’ mobile applications, based on findings from monitoring services like Downdetector and Sboy.rf.

By noon, Sberbank acknowledged that “some” customers were indeed facing issues and claimed that all services had been restored.

This outage coincided with heightened government internet restrictions targeting platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. There have also been renewed efforts to limit the use of VPNs, which many Russians rely on to bypass censorship and surveillance.

Data from Down Detector indicated there was a notable outage affecting Russia’s banking sector that lasted about two hours on Friday morning.

The Central Bank’s National Payment Card System (NSPK) stated that the disruptions were due to a “technical failure at one of the banks,” clarifying that the bank’s internal systems continued to function normally.

“This situation does not affect the security of funds,” NSPK reassured users.

The NSPK oversees Russia’s Fast Payment System, which enables instant bank-to-bank transfers using phone numbers and QR codes, and it was impacted by Friday’s outage.