According to The Barents Observer, a YouTube user from Moscow believes that this is revenge for the banning of Russian propaganda channels on the video service.
The video service YouTube does not work in almost all of Russia, reports a northern Norwegian online magazine The Barents Observer.
Following the operation of the video service Russian site received on Thursday evening 8.8. at 7 p.m. more than 250 error reports. 91 percent of the error messages generally concerned YouTube’s functionality and access to the page. Several users of the service report on the site that they cannot use the service and watch videos at all.
The most problems have been reported in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other big cities, also in the neighboring regions of Finland, in the regions of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and in the Republic of Karelia.
The Russians interviewed by the Norwegian newspaper talk about the problems.
– This is revenge for the fact that Russian propaganda channels, such as Russia Today, were banned on YouTube. Russian authorities want Russians not to see independent political analysis online, a YouTuber in Moscow interviewed by the Barents Observer Maxim believes.
According to a Norwegian newspaper, YouTube’s slowdown and usage problems have continued in Russia for about a month.
Russia has developed its own similar services
All Russians interviewed by the magazine have had no problems. According to them, it doesn’t matter if there are problems.
Russia has developed its own similar services to replace Western ones. The video service equivalent to YouTube is Rutube, free email services are offered by Mail.ru. The Russian search engine is called Yandex. The VKontakte community corresponds to Facebook, among others.
Up until now, it has been possible to use YouTube in Russia without a VPN service, i.e. a virtual private service that can be used to bypass internet restrictions. Other Western services such as Instagram and Facebook are restricted in Russia because the country’s administration has declared them extremist organizations and therefore banned.
However, many Russians use a VPN service to access banned sites and apps.
Russian rulers and administration have talked about their own Internet, which is called Runet. It would be detached from the international, western network.