Russia's internet monitoring service said thousands of YouTube outages had been reported in Russia.
Russian internet monitoring services have reported a massive outage affecting video hosting site YouTube amid mounting official criticism of the platform.
Russian internet monitoring service Sboi.rf said thousands of outages had been reported on Thursday, with users saying they could only access the platform via virtual private networks (VPNs).
“YouTube is not working,” said one anonymous user in the comments on the site.
Reuters news agency journalists in Russia were unable to access YouTube. The website remained unavailable on some mobile devices.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Russia's state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
YouTube is one of the last major bastions of free expression on the Internet in Russia, where the site continues to host materials from Kremlin opponents that have been largely removed from other popular social media sites.
A video of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny claiming that President Vladimir Putin is the ultimate owner of an opulent palace, something Putin denies, has been viewed more than 132 million times.
YouTube ban could harm online freedom in Russia
Blocking YouTube, used by more than 50 million Russians every day according to Mediascope, could have damaging consequences for freedom of expression online, threaten Russia's overall internet connectivity and the livelihoods of thousands of content creators, four experts, researchers and bloggers told Reuters.
“We have seen certain regions lose YouTube connectivity altogether or slow down by 90 percent for a few days, which can’t really be explained by old servers,” said Boris Pastukhov, a political scientist and lawyer with 93,000 YouTube subscribers.
Pastukhov said this suggested Russia was regularly modifying its blocking approach and argued that the YouTube server failure could only be blamed for a small portion of the outages, if any.
Alexander Khinshtein, head of a parliamentary committee on information policy, said on July 25 that YouTube's speed would drop by up to 70 percent in the coming weeks, as part of a campaign to persuade the video hosting site to restore blocked Russian channels.
The downgrade was “a necessary step, directed not against Russian users, but against the administration of a foreign resource that still believes it can violate and ignore our legislation without punishment,” he said on Telegram.
A day later, Khinshtein explicitly blamed the slowdown on Google's failure to invest in Russian infrastructure, such as its local caching servers.
In response to this, a YouTube spokesperson told Reuters last week that the company was aware of reports that some people were unable to access YouTube in Russia. This was not due to any action or technical issue on its part, the spokesperson said.
YouTube repeated that statement on Thursday.
