Russia is being cut off from YouTube

In Russia and in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea, users have encountered serious problems when trying to access the YouTube video hosting service. The service suddenly stopped working both on computers and mobile devices, which caused a wave of complaints across the country.

On the morning of 8 August, more than 5,000 complaints about YouTube's inaccessibility were registered. The largest number of complaints came from Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Ufa and temporarily occupied Crimea. When trying to access the site, Russians are faced with a message about the lack of connection.

Interestingly, the problem affected only Russian users. According to the Downdetector service, no such failures are observed in other countries.

These failures may be related to the recent decision of the Russian authorities to slow down the speed on YouTube to a level that does not allow you to view even low-quality videos. To understand to what level the speed of Russian YouTube users has fallen, here are the standard speed criteria for this service:

• 240p (low quality): 0.5 Mbps
• 360p (standard quality): 1 Mbps
• 480p (medium quality): 2.5 Mbps
• 720p (HD): 5 Mbps
• 1080p (Full HD): 10 Mbps
• 1440p (2K): 20 Mbps
• 2160p (4K UHD): 35-50 Mbps

Russian users were limited to 0.1 Mbps

It is worth noting that earlier the Russian analogue of YouTube, known as "Platform", also faced serious technical difficulties, which occurred against the background of restrictions imposed on Google services.

Experts believe that these measures may be part of preparations for the possible complete blocking of YouTube in Russia, which, according to rumours, could happen as early as September.