Internet disrupted in Russia as regulator imposes new measures

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Network data from the NetBlocks Internet Observatory confirm the disruption of internet service in Russia as of Wednesday 10 March 2021.

High latency along with a partial disruption to connectivity on network operator Rostelecom were observed on Wednesday coinciding with the announcement of new restrictions by the telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor.

The incident comes as Russian internet regulatory body Roskomnadzor announces protective measures to slow, or throttle, access to Twitter services citing an alleged failure by the company to remove harmful content over extended periods of time.

Although timings indicate a connection, a definitive relationship between the announcement and the disruption itself which impacted multiple services has not been established.

Methodology

Internet performance and service reachability are determined via NetBlocks web probe privacy-preserving analytics. Each measurement consists of latency round trip time, outage type and autonomous system number aggregated in real-time to assess service availability and latency in a given country. Network providers and locations are enumerated as vantage point pairs. The root cause of a service outage may be additionally corroborated by means of traffic analysis and manual testing as detailed in the report.

NetBlocks diffscans, which map the IP address space of a country in real time, show internet connectivity levels and corresponding outages. Purposeful internet outages may have a distinct network pattern used by NetBlocks to determine and attribute the root cause of an outage, a process known as attribution which follows detection and classification stages.

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