Weapons plants targeted by kamikaze drones, rebellions in an oil-producing region and power outages in -30°C temperatures – Russia seems to be ruled by chaos just weeks before the presidential elections.
Apart from pushing with his war in Ukraine and keeping close relationships with allies North Korea and China, Vladimir Putin is now faced with the largest Internet meltdown ever.
People from all corners of the country were reporting issues accessing giants like Google and Yandex.
Sites with the .ru domain were unavailable for hours on Tuesday, including those of banks and news companies.
It was initially unclear if the failure was entirely domestic – or an external attack.
It came as Putin is seeking to isolate the Russian web from the West, limiting the access of his people to outside influences.
There was no advance warning of the chaos but Russia did not initially blame the widespread outage on foreign interference.
The e-mayhem lasted at least an hour and a half and covered all 11 time zones in Russia from the Baltic to the Pacific.
Cash registers linked to the country’s biggest bank Sberbank – which operates the largest payments system – failed in supermarkets.
Queues formed in stores and screens announced: ‘One of our services is not yet available’ and ‘Loyalty card discounts cannot be applied.’
’The Internet is broken,’ complained users.
The Kremlin’s own site was temporarily hit as were other Russian government sites.
Source: https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/31/russias-internet-hit-a-gigantic-outage-theories-swirling-20199930/