Mass Blackout Takes Russian Internet Offline

Hundreds of websites on the Russian-speaking internet were inaccessible Tuesday evening as a DNSSEC failure took .ru and .рф domains offline, writes MT.

Users both inside and outside Russia complained of outages of major web-based platforms like Tinkoff Bank, online marketplaces Avito and Wildberries, search engine Yandex and telecoms provider MTS.

The Moscow Times’ Russian service was among the websites impacted by the blackout.

The national administrator for the .ru and .рф domains said at 10:21 p.m. Moscow time that it had resolved the DNSSEC failure, some two hours after it said it was working to fix the problem.

“The technical problem associated with the global DNSSEC infrastructure which caused inaccessibility of sites in the .ru zone has been resolved,” the .RU/.Рф Domain Coordination Center said on its Telegram channel.

“Problems with DNS may continue for some time until the updated data is distributed throughout the domain name system.”