Russian users encountered difficulties in using Google’s services on Saturday, August 12. According to the DownRadar service, the problems were recorded in various parts of the country, with complaints coming particularly often from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan.
According to Downradar, users began complaining about problems with Google services from 16:00 Moscow time. Within two hours, the service registered more than 1,000 complaints. Outside Russia, similar problems are not observed, as can be seen from the statistics of another monitoring service, Downdetector.
According to GlobalCheck, Google services work differently for different mobile operators. Thus, MegaFon and Tele2 operators have zero availability when using the domain.com and 25% availability when using the Russian domain.ru. Beeline also has problems when using the Russian domain. When using a VPN, access to Google is preserved.
YouTube, a video hosting service owned by Google, was not as badly affected. According to DownRadar, there are far fewer complaints about its availability. According to GlobalCheck, the video host has 100 percent availability.
The day before, on August 11, Google began blocking Google Workspace corporate services for sanctioned Russian companies. A mailing from the US corporation explained the blocking as “spam messages”.
A few days earlier in Russia recorded a massive failure in the work of VPN-services. Users complain about problems with OpenVPN, WireGuard and Terona. Officially, all VPN services that are not connected to the Federal State Information System (FGIS), which contains a register of banned content, are banned in Russia.
Roskomnadzor has not restricted the work of foreign search services, Roskomnadzor said. “For questions about the availability of Google services, please contact Google”, RBC quoted a spokesman for the agency as saying.
