“.ru” pages not accessible
Russian internet partially paralyzed
January 31, 2024, 4:21 a.m
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The mobile Internet is unavailable in several regions of Russia for hours; domains ending in .ru are affected. Observers believe it is possible that the outage has something to do with an attempt to isolate the Russian network.
Millions of mobile phone users in Russia had temporary problems accessing websites or apps in the .ru domain yesterday. Users in the capital Moscow reported that their banking apps did not work, but service portals, social networks and news sites were also unavailable. In the evening, the Ministry of Digitalization announced that the technical problems had been resolved. Access to the affected pages worked again.
A specific reason for the breakdown, which was noticeable in several parts of Russia, was not given. Sites such as the German domain .de could still be reached from Moscow via mobile phones.
According to the independent Russian Internet portal Meduza, it could have been a successful hacker attack or a mistake by the administrators of the .ru domain. The most likely scenario, however, was a failed experiment to test the Russian part of the Internet under conditions of isolation, it was said.
Constant internet outages
Observers had long expected that the creation of an independent Russian Internet, ordered by Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, could lead to failures. The government also plans to transfer all Russian Internet users to a national DNS server. Independent experts attributed the serious breakdown at the end of the month to these government interventions.
Media last reported internet problems in some parts of Russia’s far east on January 24th. Accordingly, there were problems with using Whatsapp and Telegram for days. In other regions, the authorities announced that the mobile Internet would be switched off at night due to technical work. According to a report in the Kommersant newspaper, this could involve work on improving air defense to protect against Ukrainian drone attacks.
Such problems are not uncommon in Russia. In the capital Moscow, disoriented taxi drivers repeatedly complain about navigation systems not working properly. But there are also many direct blocks of internet portals. Russian authorities have blocked thousands of websites with non-governmental content. They are only accessible via protected connections via VPN servers.