The YouTube slowdown in Russia: why it happens

The video spins in place, the quality drops to 240p on its own or the clip will not load at all — while the next tab with your email and maps works as if nothing were wrong. A speed test shows normal numbers, restarting the router changes nothing, and it feels like the device is at fault.

The device is not at fault. Below is an account of what actually happened to YouTube in Russia: the official version, what independent measurements showed, and what changed by 2026. This explains the mechanics; it is not advice on what to do about them.

How it started: the summer of 2024

On 11 July 2024 subscribers of Rostelecom and Tele2 noticed that video had stopped opening in high quality. The next day Rostelecom warned of disruptions, and the Kremlin explained them by equipment that had not been updated for more than two years.

On 25 July the head of the relevant State Duma committee, Alexander Khinshtein, described it differently: a “forced step aimed not at Russian users but at the administration of a foreign resource.” A day later he said the video platform’s traffic had already fallen by 40%, and warned of a further drop in loading speed — of up to 70%.

By 1 August the slowdown had become nationwide: video delivery was limited so severely that only 240p-level quality remained. That same day Google told Kommersant that the disruptions were not caused by technical problems on its side. In December 2024 the restrictions reached mobile internet for the first time — over two days the number of complaints on the Sboy.rf outage tracker grew from a thousand to more than forty thousand.

The official version: servers that stopped being maintained

On 26 July 2024 Roskomnadzor explained events this way: Google had left Russia and stopped supporting the infrastructure of its caching servers inside Russian telecom networks.

These are Google Global Cache — servers Google places inside an operator’s network. They hold copies of popular clips, maps, updates and search images. When you start a video it travels not halfway around the world but from a server a few dozen kilometres away: faster for the subscriber and cheaper for the operator, who does not have to push that traffic through external channels.

Such servers really were disconnected. In May 2022 Google closed its contracts with MFTI-Telecom near Moscow and Radiosvyaz in Orenburg; the former linked this to sanctions against the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Large operators reported no disruptions at the time. And in December 2025 Google notified Russian providers that it was removing the hardware: Dell R720 servers were being decommissioned from 26 January 2026.

What independent measurements showed

Traffic analysis in the summer of 2024 produced a picture that does not match the official version:

• What was limited was not the addresses of the caching servers but the site name. The equipment looked at the name that is sent in clear text at the very start of a secure connection and reacted to requests addressing googlevideo.com — the addresses that serve the video itself. At some providers the local Google servers were not limited at all.
• Google’s other services worked normally. Mail, Drive, the app store and search images opened as usual. Worn-out shared cache would have affected them too.
• The degradation arrived as a wave within one day. As Roskomsvoboda noted, equipment cannot degrade in a minute — it degrades gradually. Here the slowdown appeared at some providers in the morning and at almost all of them by evening.
• Different protocols were affected differently. Connections over the QUIC protocol were not limited at first and were added later — worn-out equipment is never that selective.

A separate argument comes from letters sent by the GRChTs, a body under Roskomnadzor, on 30 August and 2 September 2024. Providers were forbidden to take any action that would speed YouTube up, with reference to the communications law and article 13.45 of the administrative code — up to revocation of their licence. Forbidding operators to fix the consequences of someone else’s worn-out equipment would be a strange thing to do.

As for scale: according to calculations by Mikhail Klimaryov of the Internet Protection Society, the algorithm discarded roughly every third packet, and by December 2024 traffic volume had fallen to about 20% of its former level.

Why YouTube is slow for some people and will not open for others

The restriction is not applied at a single point for the whole country but on equipment belonging to telecom operators, and their settings differ. Hence the spread that confuses people:

• The operator. Rostelesyet, an association of more than two hundred regional operators, complained to the competition authority in September 2024 about “severe and uneven” slowdown and about discriminatory conditions for telecom operators.
• The region. How deep the restriction went also depended on the capacity of a particular operator’s equipment in a particular place.
• The type of connection. Until December 2024 the degradation on home wired internet was noticeably worse than on mobile networks.
• The protocol. Connections using different protocols were not restricted at the same time, so video played in one app and not in another.

The popular observation that “evenings are worse than mornings”, however, is not confirmed by independent measurements — those are user impressions, and we will not present them as fact.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

On 10 February 2026 the youtube.com domain disappeared from the recursive DNS servers of the National Domain Name System. Roskomnadzor made no separate statement about YouTube itself.

The wording “switched off completely in one move” is inaccurate here. Russian providers do not use that system by default: checks showed that the DNS servers of Rostelecom and Yandex kept returning correct addresses, and outage trackers recorded no spike in complaints. More precisely: since February 2026 YouTube is officially listed as unavailable and does not open for most users, but that is achieved by a combination of measures rather than a single DNS record.

After that the picture became even less even. On 19 March 2026 the filtering equipment could not cope with the load: the share of failed requests to Telegram reached 80–90%, and on some networks YouTube and WhatsApp started opening again. On 15 June 2026 YouTube unexpectedly worked for Rostelecom subscribers without any additional means — no explanation followed. And in early August 2026 the largest wave of restrictions on VPN services was recorded: entire address ranges were blocked rather than individual addresses.

What happened to the audience

It did not disappear entirely. In fact, over the first five months of 2026 YouTube’s daily reach in Russia grew by about 4%, to 22.4 million people, while Rutube’s fell. This is explained by the accumulated library, the quality of recommendations and the fact that part of the audience keeps watching through means of access.

Is YouTube formally blocked in Russia

The legal side looks unusual. YouTube is not listed in the registry of banned resources, and the measure called “slowdown” does not exist in legislation — telecom operators said so directly, and never received an official answer about the legal grounds for what was happening. The terms about “fragmentation” and “substitution” of traffic used in the GRChTs letters do not appear in current law either.

The equipment all of this runs on appeared at operators under the sovereign internet law, in force since November 2019, which obliged them to install technical countermeasures against threats.

The courts did not clarify matters. In January 2025 a user’s claim against Roskomnadzor was rejected on the grounds that the agency has no powers to carry out inspections in connection with reduced data exchange speeds. On 31 March 2026 the Moscow City Court upheld the termination of proceedings in another case — but on a procedural ground: the claim had been filed by a person without the right to file it under administrative procedure. The lawfulness of the restriction was not examined on the merits, so headlines saying “the court found the blocking lawful” are an oversimplification.

What Russian law actually says about VPNs and what people are really fined for is covered separately, document by document: is it legal to use a VPN in Russia.

What this means for a viewer

• It is not your device. Replacing the router, resetting settings and reinstalling the app have no effect on a selective restriction.
• The comparison takes a minute to check. If mail, maps and the app store open quickly while video stalls, the problem is not your channel or the speed of your plan.
• The picture differs between operators. That is why other people’s experience cannot be reproduced: they are on a different network with different equipment settings.
• The situation changes in jumps. During 2026 the service managed to become unavailable, open again in places and disappear once more — that is not an error on your side.

How exactly this equipment identifies connections by their shape, and why some connection methods stop working sooner than others, is covered in a technical explainer: what VLESS and Reality are, in plain English.

The short version

• The slowdown began on 11 July 2024 and became nationwide by 1 August; the official reason given was the end of support for Google’s caching servers.
• Measurements showed a selective restriction based on the site name: only video suffered, while Google’s other services worked normally.
• Providers were forbidden by GRChTs letters to take any action that would speed the service up — under threat of losing their licence.
• Since February 2026 YouTube is officially listed as unavailable, but that is achieved by a combination of measures rather than a single decision.
• Watch time fell by 67%, and yet the service still has around 22 million viewers a day in Russia.
• There is no separate legal act about blocking YouTube, and the courts have not examined the question on the merits.