Russian internet monitoring service said there had been thousands of glitches reported about YouTube in Russia.
Russian internet monitoring services have reported a mass outage affecting the video hosting site YouTube amid increasing official criticism of the platform.
Russian internet monitoring service Sboi.rf said thousands of glitches had been reported on Thursday with users saying they could only access the platform through virtual private networks (VPNs).
“YouTube is not working,” one anonymous user said in comments on the site.
Reuters news agency reporters in Russia were unable to access YouTube. The website 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 reply to a request for comment.
YouTube is one of the last major bastions of free expression on the Russian internet, where the site continues to host materials by Kremlin opponents that have been largely removed from other popular social media sites.
One video by late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, alleging 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 hurt Russian online freedom
Blocking YouTube, used by more than 50 million Russians every day, according to Mediascope, could have damaging implications for online freedom of speech, threaten Russia’s general internet connectivity and the livelihoods of thousands of content creators, four experts, researchers and bloggers told Reuters.
“We’ve seen that particular regions lose Youtube connectivity overall or slow down by 90 percent for a few days, which is not really explainable by servers being old,” said Boris Pastukhov, a political scientist and solicitor with 93,000 YouTube subscribers.
Pastukhov said this suggested Russia was regularly tweaking its blocking approach and argued that YouTube server failure could only be blamed for a small portion of outages, if at all.
Alexander Khinshtein, head of a parliamentary committee on information policy, said on July 25 that YouTube speeds would drop by as much as 70 percent in coming weeks, part of a drive 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 because of any actions or technical issues on its part, the spokesperson said.
YouTube repeated that statement on Thursday.