Massive internet outage in Russia: glitch or a step towards national DNS server?
9:58 AM EST, January 31, 2024, updated: 4:35 AM EST, March 7, 2024
The War in Ukraine: Follow the latest updates in our live relay
The disruptions affected services of Yandex, Russia's primary search engine, as well as the country's largest retail bank, Sberbank. VKontakte (comparable to Facebook), and the Gosuslugi portal, which Russians use for administrative tasks, were also affected.
The malfunction wasn't limited to Russia; complaints from internet users overseas were also reported.
Russian authorities attribute the outage to a technical fault
The Russian Ministry of Digital Development explained that the disruptions were tied to a technical issue with a suite of extensions for the DNS protocol (DNSSEC technology), according to The Moscow Times. The issues persisted for several hours.
Radio Svoboda notes that experts have pointed to the Russian authorities' long-standing plans to transition all Internet users to a national DNS server, suggesting this could be a factor in the current situation.
In other news, the functioning of the 4G network in several Russian regions has recently reported disruptions, which some speculate could be due to the army calibrating equipment for air defense.
