Russia Just Had Its Biggest Internet Outage, and No One Knows Why

Russia had its biggest internet outage on Tuesday evening, and conflicting information has emerged about what could have caused the disruptions.

Internet users across the country and abroad were unable to access sites with the .ru domain for hours on Tuesday evening, with the outage affecting hundreds of mobile applications and websites. Radio Svoboda, the Russian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, cited experts as saying that the outage was likely the largest in recent history.

The latest large-scale outage came days after Russian media reported localized disruptions in Russia's Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions.

Russia's Digital Development Ministry said on Wednesday the outage had been fixed, and that it was caused by technical problems with its Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which strengthens authentication in the Domain Name System using digital signatures based on public key cryptography.

It added that "problems with DNS may continue for some time until the updated data is distributed throughout the domain name system."

The digital development ministry, however, didn't elaborate on what caused the DNSSEC failure.

The Net Freedoms Project, which has more than 38,000 subscribers on Telegram, suggested that the outage could have been caused by Russian authorities testing an isolationist system which backfired.

It said Russian authorities have "long warned that they would try to move all users in the country to the national DNS server."

"A large-scale Internet network failure has occurred in Russia—many websites in the .ru domain zone stopped opening," Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.

"Banking applications, including Sberbank, are not functioning. Failures are noted in the operation of mobile operators," wrote Gerashchenko, adding that "reasons for the failure are unclear."

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment by email.

Although it's unclear if the events are related, Russian news outlet RBC reported on January 29 that internet was shut down in several Russian regions from January 25 onwards for security reasons linked to the visits of "high-ranking officials" to these areas.

The news outlet reported that during the affected dates, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, where they both participated in events dedicated to marking 80 years since lifting of the siege of Leningrad.

A source in the telecommunications industry told the publication that the internet shutdowns were to reduce the threat of attacks. Another source linked the disruptions with the "need for protection from enemy drones."

On January 18, Ukraine launched a drone attack on a St. Petersburg oil terminal, marking the first time that a drone had targeted Putin's home region since the full-scale war in Ukraine began in February 2022.

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