Throttled by the Kremlin

YouTube increasingly difficult to access in Russia

The world's largest video platform YouTube is being heavily throttled in Russia.

(Bild: flickr.com/Rego Korosi)

There are increasing complaints in Russia that the video platform YouTube is only working to a limited extent. Several media outlets reported outages and referred to the "Sboj.RF" service, which records reports of disruptions on websites. 

According to the service, complaints were mainly reported in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also from other parts of the country.

Russia had already blocked major social networks such as X and Facebook, which can only be used via protected connections (VPN). The problems with the video platform come as no surprise. Andrei Nastasin, deputy spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained that the platform had blocked Russian channels to Moscow's annoyance and had also ignored the Russian authorities' request to remove more than 60,000 posts that they considered to be banned and extremist.

Throttled by the Kremlin
At the end of last week, Member of Parliament Alexander Chinstein wrote on his Telegram channel that the speed of downloading YouTube content could drop by up to 70 percent. The head of the Duma Committee for Information Policy spoke of an allegedly necessary measure. The throttling was not directed against users in Russia, but against the YouTube management, "who still believe they can violate and ignore our legislation with impunity".

Russia had already made preparations for a possible shutdown of the internet in the country before the start of its war of aggression against Ukraine. Since the start of the war, the Russian supervisory authority Roskomnadzor has blocked thousands of websites that the Russian power apparatus does not like.