Users in Russia’s Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Ivanovo and Kostroma regions began complaining on 15 November about widespread disruptions to Rostelecom’s home wired Internet service, the Russian daily Kommersant reported.
Residents of Russia’s Yaroslavl region said that the internet disappeared on Saturday afternoon and had not reappeared by evening. Cable television was also affected by the problems. Similar complaints came from neighbouring regions.
The Yaroslavl branch of Rostelecom said the accident was “due to the fault of third parties”. The Vladimir branch specified that a trunk wire in the territory of the Yaroslavl region of the Russian Federation was damaged.
In the Vladimir region of Russia, where mobile Internet has been switched off since mid-August, the failure in the Network became “particularly sensitive,” Zebra TV reported.
By Saturday evening, the connection began to gradually recover, but on Sunday morning, residents of other Russian regions complained about disruptions with wired Internet. In total, more than 10 Russian regions and republics experienced problems with the Internet.
According to Digital Report, the outage differed from typical crashes: many users’ access did not disappear completely, but was limited – only sites from the so-called “white list” – a list of services and resources available during mobile Internet outages in Russia for security reasons – were opened.
“The nature of the failure, in which traffic filtering works but access does not, points to more complex processes than just a cable break,” the publication said.
According to Digital Report, such selectivity of access – while maintaining a “white list” – is one of the scenarios envisaged by Russia’s “sovereign Runet” legislation. It provides for the installation on operators’ networks of special equipment for deep filtering and routing of traffic. This system, managed by Roskomnadzor, is designed to isolate Runet from external threats, but also allows restricting access to resources inside the country.
At the same time, the publication does not specify from where it has information about access to the “white list”.