Major banks across Russia on Friday reported major service breakdowns. Their apps crashed, ATMs stopped working, and other capabilities collapsed. The outages caused major complications in everyday life and the economy: Public transport had to stop collecting fares, while some businesses switched to cash-only operations.

The culprit? Not Ukrainian drones or a major cyberattack — rather, the Russian government’s own attempt to block the use of virtual private networks, or VPNs.