Russian government websites down amid reported attempts to slow down Twitter

Previous attempts by the Kremlin to block Telegram, a popular messaging app, in Russia have completely failed

Credit: Valery Sharifullin/Tass

The official websites of the Kremlin, Russian government, parliament and at least several ministries were down on Wednesday morning as Russian authorities apparently moved to target Twitter.

Russia’s communications watchdog said on Wednesday that it has begun slowing down Twitter’s services after threatening to block it altogether over its refusal to remove harmful content.

The announcement is the Kremlin’s first salvo against social media platforms since January opposition protests. Several senior officials have since promised to go after foreign social media for their refusal to filter out posts about the protests that the Kremlin views as illegal.

Twitter appeared to be loading posts slower than usual for some users on Wednesday while the service was largely uninterrupted for others.

But it is the Russian government websites that appeared to be the immediate victim of the crackdown: Kremlin.ru, govenrment.ru and other websites were unavailable for some users in Russia on Wednesday morning.

The outrage resembles desperate attempts by the Russian government a few years ago to block popular messaging app Telegram when numerous Russian websites including government ones briefly emerged as collateral damage of the shutdown.

The Kremlin failed to block Telegram, which has worked to bypass the restrictions, and ultimately backed down.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not  have an immediate comment on Wednesday but said that he was able to access kremlin.ru from his office computer.

Russia’s Ministry for Digital Development later in the day denied any links between attempts to throttle Twitter and the outage of government websites, blaming it on an equipment issue at a state-owned Internet provider.