In Russia, the audience of Asian instant messengers grew sharply amid the Telegram block, Kommersant wrote, citing a study by MTS AdTech. In March, the monthly active audience (MAU) of these correspondents, according to MTS AdTech, increased by an average of 60%.
Turkish service BiP showed the biggest growth, with its monthly active audience in March increasing by 105%, to 1.68 million active users. Korean messenger KakaoTalk increased the number of active active users by 82% to 436.4 thousand active users. In March, the Chinese app WeChat increased its audience in Russia by 15%, reaching 1.15 million active users.
The fastest growth in March, according to MTS AdTech, was demonstrated by the unofficial Telegram client Telega – by 160%, to an active audience of about 7.5 million people. In early April, it was removed from the App Store due to security certificates being revoked.
The growing popularity of Asian instant messaging has also been confirmed by other telecom operators. Thus, T2 has noted the growth of WeChat users since mid-January, drawing attention to the fact that registering in this messenger is difficult, because to do this you need to receive SMS messages from China. At the end of March, according to T2, KakaoTalk’s popularity among users increased sharply. Megafon also recorded an increase in the number of users of KakaoTalk, BiP and WeChat messengers.
Overall, in the first quarter of 2026, the audience of Telegram itself decreased slightly – by 1.5% compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, Kommersant wrote, noting that this messenger retained its position as a leader among platforms with a monthly active audience of 102 million users.
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Since the beginning of March, users in Russia have been experiencing outages in the operation of Telegram. Sources from several publications have reported that they plan to completely block the messenger in Russia starting April 1. Already in March, Telegram did not work for many users without means of bypassing the block, and by April 10, an international research project reported that the level of anomalies indicating signs of Telegram being blocked had reached 95%.