YouTube experiences serious service disruption across Russia
YouTube experienced a disruption in Russia, with users reporting issues accessing the site and playing videos, the Russian DW reported on Aug. 1. The outage peaked around midnight.
The outage peaked around midnight.
According to Downradar services, over 400 user complaints were recorded at the height of the disruption. Within an hour, the number of complaints dropped to 275, and by 6:30 a.m. EET, it had decreased further to 111.
Most complaints originated from Moscow and its surrounding region, with additional reports from Saint Petersburg, Leningrad Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, Novosibirsk Oblast, Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Murmansk, Rostov-on-Don, Tver, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, and other regional centers across Russia.
Rostelecom, Russia's largest digital services provider, previously warned of potential YouTube disruptions due to "technical issues with Google equipment" used in its network infrastructure.
Alexander Khinshtein, head of the technology committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, said on July 25 that the Russian government would begin slowing down YouTube’s performance in the coming days. The loading speed of the service on desktop computers is expected to be reduced by up to 70% by early August, without affecting the mobile version of the site. He attributed this slowdown to YouTube's policy of "consistently deleting channels of our public figures," whose views do not align with the "Western point of view."
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has noted that the Russian government has increasingly discussed plans to block YouTube in Russia. The government is likely to pursue this goal, forcing Russians to use only social media platforms that are influenced or controlled by the Kremlin.
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