Russia experienced its biggest internet outage on Tuesday night, and conflicting data emerged about the conceivable reasons for the outages.
Internet users across the country and abroad were unable to access sites with the .ru domain for hours on Tuesday evening, with the outage affecting hundreds of mobile applications and websites. Radio Svoboda, the Russian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, cited experts as saying that the outage was likely the largest in recent history.
The latest large-scale outage came days after Russian media reported localized disruptions in Russia’s Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions.
Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development said on Wednesday that the outage had been resolved and that it was due to technical disruptions with its Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), whose authentication in the Domain Name System employs virtual signatures based on public-key cryptography.
He added that “problems with the DNS could persist for some time until updated information is distributed to the Domain Name System. “
The Ministry of Digital Development, however, did specify the cause of the DNSSEC’s failure.
The Net Freedoms Project, which has more than 38,000 subscribers on Telegram, warned that the outage could have been caused simply because the Russian government tried an isolationist formula that backfired.
It says the Russian government “has been warning for a long time that they will verify and move all users in the country to the national DNS server. “
“A large-scale Internet network failure has occurred in Russia—many websites in the .ru domain zone stopped opening,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.
“Banking applications, as Sberbank adds, do not work. Faults are discovered in the operation of mobile operators,” Gerashchenko wrote, adding that “the reasons for this failure are not clear. “
Newsweek has reached out to Russia’s Foreign Ministry for emailed comment.
Although it’s unclear if the events are related, Russian news outlet RBC reported on January 29 that internet was shut down in several Russian regions from January 25 onwards for security reasons linked to the visits of “high-ranking officials” to these areas.
The news outlet reported that during the affected dates, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, where they both participated in events dedicated to marking 80 years since lifting of the siege of Leningrad.
A source in the telecommunications industry told the publication that the internet shutdowns were to reduce the threat of attacks. Another source linked the disruptions with the “need for protection from enemy drones.”
On Jan. 18, Ukraine announced a drone attack on an oil terminal in St. Petersburg, marking the first time a drone has targeted Putin’s home region since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022.
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Isabel van Brugen is a Newsweek journalist based in Kuala Lumpur. She focuses on the Russia-Ukraine war. Isabel joined Newsweek in 2021 and in the past worked with media outlets such as the Daily Express, The Times, Harper’s BAZAAR, and Grazia. She holds a Master’s degree in City Press Journalism from the University of London and a BA in Russian-language Journalism from Queen Mary, University of London. Languages: English, Russian
You can contact Isabel by emailing i. vanbrugen@newsweek. com or following her on X @isabelvanbrugen