Once I found out that my Viber app can’t sent any message, all messages were frozen with clock icons, which probably means “something in progress”. Waiting a day, two days, a week and a bit more didn’t bring any news, so I’ve started to look what it means on Internet. And the problem is much more popular than my wildest prediction. Just a small note: this is Ukraine, 2023 and war time.

How Viber shadowban works

Viber’s tactic is very cool: they don’t tell you about the banned or blocked account. Why is that? The answer is easy: tons of Google searches like “banner account what to do?” are bad for product promotion, it’s much better to hide them all wuth “nicer” looking error “can’t send a message, please contact support”. So the user forces to try to figure it for himself: check if Wi-Fi works, update to latest version and only then contact the support. “Perfect solution”, don’t you think?

Similar cases with short notes

Viber massively bans Ukrainian accounts, and this is not the hate post or fake news. Do you see a similarity in the following cases?

Viber blocked my account as spam. I’m trying to help a teen in a bomb shelter in Ukraine. Help me out.
I found a cool comic the other day and got in touch with the person that was writing it to help them with the English translation. They started making this comic when they had to go into a bomb shelter. A great tool was Viber because it automatically translates between Ukrainian and English. We don’t speak each others languages so this has been a really important tool.
I could really use this tool moving forward but apparently I tripped the spam filter and now am permanently blocked with no recourse.
I am going to reach out through this and other public channels to see if there is way to fix this so I can keep talking with my new friend.

Source: Reddit

Viber has been blocked for sending spam, is there any chance to restore it?
I’m having a disaster, hundreds of chats with clients and Viber has been blocked.
Is there any way to restore it?
Because I received some kind of “sorry” in English, I hardly understood anything, and I can’t copy and paste it into a translator (((

The post from another person:

I could not [to unblock it]. I wrote to support, gave the proof that the messages and photos were working drawings, not the advertising, they wrote back to me and said that they could not do anything. I had to switch to WhatsApp and quickly change the number.

Sorce: kidstaff.com.ua

Yesterday I sent a lot of invitations to the group. Apparently, for this reason blocked messages in general.
I wrote to support. Received an automatic reply from the system:
“Hell