YouTube outage in Russia amid criticism of Putin

The site’s download speeds have notably slowed in recent weeks

Russia Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to the head of the Republic of Mordovia Artem Zdunov during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024 (Sputnik)

Russian is seeing a reported mass outage on the availability of video hosting site YouTube on Thursday as Russian authorities step up criticism of the platform.

Internet monitoring service Sboi.rf said there had been thousands of glitches reported about YouTube in Russia. Users said they could only access YouTube via virtual private networks (VPNs).

“YouTube is not working,” one anonymous user said in comments on the site.

Reuters reporters in Russia were unable to access YouTube. The website remained available via some mobile devices.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Russia’s state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor also did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

YouTube is one of the last major bastions of free expression on the Russian internet, where the site continues to host materials by Kremlin opponents that have been largely removed from other social media sites popular in Russia.

The site’s download speeds have notably slowed in recent weeks, for which Russian lawmakers have blamed YouTube owner Alphabet’s Google, something the company disputes.

Alexander Khinshtein, head of a parliamentary committee on information policy, warned last month that YouTube speeds would drop by as much as 70%.

He said the degradation was “a necessary step, directed not against Russian users, but against the administration of a foreign resource that still believes it can violate and ignore our legislation without punishment.”

Khinshtein later explicitly blamed the slowdown on Google’s failure to invest in Russian infrastructure, such as its local cache servers, something YouTube rejected.

A YouTube spokesperson said last week it was aware of reports that some people were unable to access YouTube in Russia. This was not because of any actions on technical issues on its part, it said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with members of the government at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Russia, 07 August 2024 (EPA)

Meanwhile, Russian forces were battling Ukrainian troops for a third day on Thursday after they smashed through the Russian border in the Kursk region, an audacious attack on the world’s biggest nuclear power that has forced Moscow to call in reserves.

In one of the biggest Ukrainian attacks on Russia of the two-year war, around 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of Aug. 6 with tanks and armoured vehicles, covered in the air by swarms of drones and pounding artillery, according to Russian officials.

Ukrainian forces swept through the fields and forests of the border towards the north of the border town of Sudzha, the last operational trans-shipping point for Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin cast the attack as a “major provocation”. The White House said the United States - Ukraine’s biggest backer - had no prior knowledge of the attack and would seek more details from Kyiv.