Power Outage at Major Russian Telecom Node Disrupts Reg.ru Services and Affects Runet Nationwide
A major power outage at a large communication node triggered widespread disruptions across the Russian internet on August 17, affecting services provided by hosting provider and domain registrar Reg.ru.
Users were unable to access the company's main website or log into their personal accounts. The problems quickly spread to numerous other sites that rely on Reg.ru infrastructure, many of which either became completely unavailable or operated intermittently.
Technical analysis of the failures suggests that DNS servers were likely impacted. These servers handle the critical task of converting human-readable domain names into the corresponding network addresses required to reach the actual servers. When this system fails, websites effectively disappear from the internet even if the underlying servers remain operational.
Complaints continued to arrive through monitoring services throughout the day. At the same time, users reported outages affecting banking applications, messengers, social networks, and various other Russian online resources. However, there is still no confirmation that every reported issue was caused by the problems at Reg.ru; multiple independent failures may have occurred simultaneously within the Runet.
At the time of initial reporting, Reg.ru had not disclosed the root cause, full scope, or expected time for complete service restoration.
Update: Company representatives later clarified that the problems were not on Reg.ru's side or within its own infrastructure. The outage resulted from an electricity supply failure at a major communication node, which rendered many resources unavailable regardless of their hosting provider. The company stated it hopes for rapid restoration of the node's functionality.
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