The Russian Internet monitoring service said thousands of outages have been reported on YouTube in Russia.
Russian internet monitoring services have reported a mass outage affecting video hosting site YouTube, amid growing official criticism of the platform.
Russian internet monitoring service Sboi.rf said thousands of outages were reported on Thursday, with users saying they could only access the platform through virtual private networks (VPNs).
“YouTube isn’t working,” said an anonymous user in comments on the site.
Reuters news agency reporters in Russia were unable to access YouTube. The site remained available on some mobile devices.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Russia’s state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
YouTube is one of the last great bastions of free speech on the Russian Internet, where the site continues to host material from Kremlin opponents that has been largely removed from other popular social media sites.
A video of late opposition leader Alexey Navalny claiming that President Vladimir Putin is the ultimate owner of an opulent palace, something Putin denies, has been viewed more than 132 million times.
YouTube ban could harm Russia’s online freedom
Blocking YouTube, used by more than 50 million Russians every day, according to Mediascope, could have harmful implications for freedom of expression online, threaten Russia’s overall internet connectivity and the livelihoods of thousands of content creators, four experts, researchers and bloggers told Reuters.
“We’ve seen specific regions lose YouTube connectivity in general or slow down by 90% for a few days, which isn’t really explainable by the fact that the servers are old,” said Boris Pastukhov, a political scientist and lawyer with 93,000 subscribers. from YouTube.
Pastukhov said this suggested Russia was regularly adjusting its blocking approach and argued that YouTube’s server failure could only be blamed for a small portion of the outages, if at all.
Alexander Khinshtein, head of a parliamentary committee on information policy, said on July 25 that YouTube’s speed would drop by up to 70% in the coming weeks, as part of an effort to persuade the video hosting site to reinstate blocked Russian channels.
The degradation was “a necessary step, directed not against Russian users, but against the administration of a foreign resource that still believes it can violate and ignore our legislation without punishment,” he said on Telegram.
A day later, Khinshtein explicitly blamed the slowdown on Google’s failure to invest in Russian infrastructure, such as its local cache servers.
Responding to this, a YouTube spokesperson told Reuters last week that it was aware of reports that some people were unable to access YouTube in Russia. This was not due to any actions or technical issues on its part, the spokesperson said.
YouTube repeated that statement on Thursday.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
