During the past few hours, hundreds of websites, mobile applications, and services in the .RU domain zone were not accessible to users. Among them were services like Yandex, Sberbank, VKontakte, Ozon, and the Government Services portal.
Complaints were received not only from all regions of the country but also from users located abroad.
The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of Russia stated that the outage was caused by a technical issue related to the DNS protocol extension, which guarantees the prevention of IP address substitution due to cyber attacks in the .RU domain zone. The ministry promised to restore access to Russian websites in the near future.
However, some experts note that the Russian authorities have long announced plans to transfer all users in the country to a national DNS server, and it is speculated that this might be happening now.