Russian citizens could not access the majority of websites on the country’s .ru domain for several hours on 30 January, including the Yandex search engine, the VKontakte social media platform, the major state-owned bank Sberbank and various news outlets.
The outage was reportedly caused by a technical problem with the .ru domain’s global Domain Name System Security Extensions, or DNSSEC. It appeared to be unintentional, unlike other recent blackouts of Russian internet services, which observers
