I don’t think anyone is buying the excuse.
One side effect we tend to see with war is that avenues of communication within the affected regions tend to disappear. Sometimes with a stated reason, other times it’s just played off as a simple error that suddenly gets fixed. World of Tanks is certainly going to be ginning up theories for why the Russian chat, and what appears to be only the Russian chat, is broken.
In a post on the official website, no official explanation for the disruption is given. Wargaming doesn’t even seem to blame it on technical issues. Players have merely been told that services are unavailable and resumption will happen “later.”
Dear players!
General and combat chats on all servers, as well as personal channels are temporarily unavailable. We will inform you about the resumption of these services later.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
While there is no way to know for sure, this decision presumably comes from entities far above the folks at Wargaming, such as Russian ISPs who in turn are beholden to demands from the Russian government. Assuming this is just strangling communications. We haven’t heard of any other specific games shutting down chat on their Russian servers, but it doesn’t seem likely people are going to chalk this off as a simple case of technical faults.
More details as they arise.
MMO Fallout 