Roskomnadzor recorded a drop in YouTube traffic in Russia

“Google had many servers in Russia: almost all nodes with many subscribers were connected to the GGC server. The company stopped supporting these servers from the moment it left the Russian Federation and no one is investing in them. The servers are degrading, they have been shut down somewhere. We observed a drop in traffic to YouTube, mainly on fixed networks,” said the RKN director.

According to him, the volume of traffic is still maintained on mobile devices, since “it seems that more powerful servers have been installed next to the nodes of mobile operators.” In turn, the regulator observes an increase in demand for domestic platforms VK and Rutube, as well as pirate sites, Lipov says. In his opinion, users “focus mainly on Russian legal services.”

When asked by journalists about the possibility of a dialogue with Google, the head of the RKN replied that the agency “has repeatedly sent a fairly large number of requests to all foreign platforms,” ​​but at the moment there is no interaction between the regulator and the American company.

• YouTube began to slow down in Russia at the end of July. RKN explained this as technical problems with Google’s servers, but the company said it had nothing to do with the failures. Before the slowdown, in early July, the video hosting blocked the channels of some Russian musicians, including Shaman.
• In August, the Win2Win communication agency surveyed 1.6 thousand users and found that the majority of them had a negative attitude towards the slowdown of YouTube. In October, Vedomosti, citing a study by the WhoIsBlogger platform, wrote that long videos on video hosting almost restored audience coverage to the 2023 level.
• In early October, RKN blocked the Discord messenger, which is popular among gamers. The department explained the decision by saying that the platform violated the requirements of Russian legislation.