Major internet domain outage reported in Russia

People across the country have been experiencing issues with access to websites on the .ru domain

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, e-commerce stores, and even state services.

It turned out that access to websites using the national .ru domain was blocked. The problems were reported in and around Moscow, in St. Petersburg, Tatarstan, Sverdlovsk Region in the Urals, and Novosibirsk Region in southern Siberia, among other locations.

Many reported not being able to access Yandex – the most popular search engine in the country – or the websites of major e-commerce stores such as 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 Gosuslugi, which provides access to state services. Internet providers in Russia, including Beeline, Megafon, and Tele2, reported that their networks were operating as usual.

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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 the outage was linked to a technical issue with the global DNSSEC infrastructure.

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (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 it was 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.