Russian internet users found themselves locked out of Google, Apple, and GitHub services beginning July 14 in what appeared to be a coordinated wave of unexplained nationwide outages, forcing citizens to turn to VPNs to restore access.
According to Russian outage monitor Detector404, problems began around 10:00 MSK with users filing more than 1,000 complaints about Google services. Reports also surfaced of failures loading Apple’s website, with some users also reporting GitHub outages including the site itself, repositories, and Git operations failing from Russian IP addresses.
Detector404 recorded that HTTPS connections to Google failed in 26 percent of cases, while connections to Apple failed at a rate of 99 percent. The outages were concentrated in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the Volgograd, Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, and Chelyabinsk regions. Users reported that services worked normally when connecting through foreign IP addresses, confirming the restrictions were tied to geolocation rather than global service disruptions.
Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor denied blocking the services, stating it had not imposed any restrictions on access to Google or Apple. Neither company has commented on the outages.
The disruptions come amid escalating tensions between Russian authorities and US technology companies. In June, Apple removed Russian state messenger Max and VK services, including VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Dzen, VK Music, and Mail, from the App Store, citing sanctions compliance requirements. The Kremlin responded by questioning Apple’s reliability as a service provider and threatening to “curtail interaction” with the US company.
Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service had given Apple until July 15 to address alleged “discrimination” against Russian search engines and to ensure pre-installation of domestic software on iOS devices, threatening fines of up to 4 billion roubles (approximately US$45 million) for non-compliance.
The outages also affected GitHub, with users unable to access repositories or perform Git operations from Russian IP addresses. GitHub’s status page showed all systems operational, suggesting regional access restrictions rather than a platform-wide issue.
The incidents follow intensified Russian government efforts to restrict VPN usage and push citizens toward domestically controlled alternatives. In late June, a previous attempt to limit VPN traffic triggered a nationwide banking outage, as filtering systems became overloaded and briefly made digital payments impossible.
Sources: TechRadar; The Moscow Times; www1.ru