YouTube Hit By Thousands Of Outages In Russia

Alphabet’s YouTube is one of the few remaining Western tech platforms still operating in Russia, but on Thursday thousands of outages have been reported in that country.

Reuters reported that Russian internet monitoring services have recorded thousands of glitches in the availability of YouTube on Thursday. It comes amid unconfirmed reports of Ukrainian forces conducting a large scale raid into Russia’s Kursk region.

According to Reuters, Russian internet monitoring service Sboi.rf has said that there had been thousands of glitches reported about YouTube in Russia. Users said they could only access YouTube via virtual private networks (VPNs).

Access denied

“YouTube is not working,” one anonymous user was quoted by Reuters as saying in comments on the site.

Reuters reporters in Russia were unable to access YouTube.

That said, the website apparently remained available via some mobile devices.

This comes after Russia last month had reduced the speed of YouTube by 70 percent, following multiple fines over failure to remove so called “banned content”.

Alexander Khinshtein, head of the technology committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, had revealed the throttling move in late July that YouTube access would be slowed by 40 percent and then 70 percent due to the firm’s “anti-Russian policy”.

Russia of course has already blocked most Western social media platforms in the wake of its illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Platforms banned in Russia include Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.

Meta’s WhatsApp had been Russia’s most popular messaging platform, but it was blocked in Russia in March 2023, alongside Snapchat, Discord, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Telegram.

However the Putin regime had until July 2024 allowed YouTube to continue functioning in part because of the lack of a clear domestic alternative.

YouTube is very popular in Russia, with industry observers noting that 42.9 percent of the Russian population opens YouTube everyday.

Russian censorship

YouTube of course plays host to many Western bloggers covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, allowing Russian citizens to access news and online content outside of Moscow’s propaganda controls.

It should be remembered that the Russian government had passed a regulation in 2017 that banned the use of VPNs, but that did not stop Russian users from downloading them.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, multiple Western tech giants have withdraw their services and products from Russia amid punishing Western sanctions.

Moscow has also waged an ongoing campaign fining the few remaining Western platforms in the country for supposed violations of local laws of that pariah nation.

In May 2022 for example Russian bailiffs seized 7.7bn roubles from Google that had been ordered as part of a fine calculated on the basis of the company’s annual turnover – which had been the first time such a fine had been levied in Russia.

The Russian unit of Google was declared bankrupt by a court in Moscow in October 2023 after more than a year of proceedings that stemmed from local officials’ seizure of funds from the company’s bank account in May 2022 in payment of a fine.

Google meanwhile continues to provide free services such as Search, YouTube and Gmail in Russia.