Pachca sees a fivefold jump in sign-ups as businesses brace for a Telegram block

Pachca, the team chat app developer, is seeing a multifold increase in new customers. Over the past weekend, company sign-ups grew roughly fivefold compared with the average in early 2026. The spike is tied to tighter restrictions on Telegram in Russia.

Since mid-February 2026, Telegram has been gradually restricted in Russia. Users are running into delays when sending messages and uploading photos and videos. According to monitoring services, more than 25,000 outage reports came in between March 14 and 16, the third day in a row of nationwide disruptions. Several media outlets report that the service could be fully blocked as early as April.

Against this backdrop, Russian companies have started actively looking for a Telegram replacement for work communication. According to Pachca, sign-ups over the weekend of March 14–15 were roughly five times higher than the average January weekend. On Monday, March 16, sign-ups are running ten times above the usual level for the same time of day.

Requests are coming from companies of all sizes, from small teams of 5 to 10 people to organizations with hundreds and thousands of employees. Teams arrive in urgent search mode: they ask for comparison tables and evaluate migration speed and switching costs. Many have already experienced Telegram's decline firsthand, from slow file uploads to the service not working at all.

"We see that companies have stopped putting off the switch. People don't want to wake up one morning and find that all their work conversations are gone. Some customers are even ready to move their family chats to us, just to avoid switching between different services," says Grigory Lyubachev, Chief Development Officer and co-founder of Pachca.

The situation resembles 2022, when Russian companies moved en masse to domestic solutions after foreign services left the market. But the current wave is moving faster: businesses aren't reacting to a shutdown that has already happened, but to the growing decline of a familiar tool. Companies are trying to prepare in advance while Telegram still partially works.

About Pachca

Pachca is a team chat app for large and midsize businesses with advanced integrations and AI agents: an open API, CLI, SDK, an n8n plugin and a platform for connecting AI agents. One of the largest team chat apps in Russia, it's available in the cloud and as hybrid on-premise (BYOK). Listed in the Russian Software Registry, it's used by more than 250,000 employees in finance, telecom, manufacturing and IT. Customers include Lamoda, Ivi, products in the Yandex ecosystem and major banks such as Alfa-Bank, PSB and others. In total, the platform serves more than 1,000 organizations.

Website: pachca.com