Russian users of Telegram and WhatsApp had trouble accessing the messaging apps on Wednesday due to disruption the state communications monitoring service said was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The service said the attack had been repelled and that the messaging networks were working normally again. Russian media said other sites, including Wikipedia, Skype and the social media platform Discord had also been affected. Wednesday's disruption to the messaging apps, which are widely popular in Russia, came weeks after Russian internet monitoring services reported a mass outage on the availability of video hosting site YouTube as Russian authorities step up criticism of the platform.