People across the country have been experiencing issues with access to websites on the national .ru domain
FILE PHOTO. © Global Look Press / IMAGO / Michael Bihlmayer
Russia experienced a massive internet outage on Tuesday as people in several parts of the country reported trouble accessing various websites, including banking services, telecommunications operators, electronic commerce stores and even state services.
It turned out that access to the websites using the national .ru domain was blocked. The problems were reported in Moscow and the capital area, in St. Petersburg, in Tatarstan, Sverdlovsk Region in the Urals and in Novosibirsk Region in south Siberia, among other locations.
Many reported not being able to access Yandex – the most popular national search engine – or the websites of major electronic commerce stores like Ozon and Wildberries, as well as the apps of Russia’s biggest banks, Sberbank and VTB Group.
Moscow residents also said they had trouble accessing the Gosuslugi portal that provides access to state services. Internet providers in Russia, including Beeline, Megafon and Tele2, maintained that their networks were operating as normal.
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The national coordination center for Top Level National Domains (TLD) .ru and .рф, which serves as the national domain registry, said that the outage was linked to a “technical issue” with the global DNSSEC infrastructure.
The Domain Name System Security Extensions or DNSSEC are specific protocols used to provide cryptographic authentication of data and secure its integrity. It is designed to protect apps using DNS from accepting forged or manipulated data.
The national TLD coordination center did not elaborate on what exactly the “technical issue” that was detected entailed. It only said that its specialists were working to resolve the issue and some “updated data” would soon be uploaded to the domain name system.
The Russian digital technologies ministry said on Tuesday evening that access to all the affected websites would be restored in the near future.
