Russia experienced one of its largest internet outages, with many sites and applications using the Russian .ru domain being unavailable for hours on the evening of Jan. 30.
Hundreds of websites and services were unaccessible, including the Yandex search engine, Sberbank, the VKontakte social media platform, as well as state services.
People all over the country were impacted by the outages. According to the state-controlled Russian news agency RBC, most issues were reported in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, Bashkortostan, and Kostroma Oblast.
Russia's Digital Ministry said that the problems were caused by a technical issue linked to a set of DNS protocol extensions.
At around 10:20 p.m. local time, the ministry announced that the issue had been resolved, though some problems with DNS may continue until the updated data is distributed throughout the domain name system.
Russian authorities have long announced plans to transfer Russian internet users to the national national DNS server, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted.
On the evening of Jan. 30, Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) announced that it had shut down the Russian Defense Ministry's server. This was only the latest in the recently reported cyberattacks in Russia, which included hacking of a Russian scientific research center and an IT company.
Ukraine was also targeted by such attacks. In one of the most devastating strikes, Russian hackers targeted Ukraine's telecommunications provider, Kyivstar, causing communication outages nationwide last December.
Nate Ostiller
