"Their logic: one service is more, one less - so what?!"

Owners and sites on which (accidentally) hit Roskomnadzor - about how much they lost

On April 16 and 17, Roskomnadzor introduced millions of IP addresses of the largest hosting providers-Amazon and Google to the register of prohibited sites. This was done to block the Telegram messenger, but led to the fact that for some time a wide variety of sites and servers were inaccessible-from online schools to courier delivery services. The owners of these sites told Medusa how they fought with an unexpected lock and how much they lost on it.

Victoria Gross

Owner of the online delivery store Giivmi.ru

We found the problem today at about 8 a.m. I have several online stores, and one of them is posted on Amazon; There were problems with him. He became inaccessible, but not for everyone, only with certain providers. Those who are now in Moscow say that the site opens, and I am outside the city, and I have - and everyone who is here with me - the site does not open. I would estimate my loss from all this at about 40 thousand rubles.

In any case, I do not plan to move from Amazon to some other hosting in Russia. My store was once placed at several Russian hosting, but it was problematic and expensive to maintain.

I think many have suffered much more losses than me, but in any case - it is unpleasant for me. Working is quite difficult to give an annoying to realize that everything collapsed simply because you were hooked with a ricochet.

Alexey Ponomar

publisher of the Useful Tips "Lifehacker"

On April 16, at about eight o’clock in the evening we began to receive a feedback from readers: a mobile application and a site do not open. People even sent us screenshots to Twitter that access to our resource is allegedly limited. We quickly realized that the case was in the Amazon Route 53 service, which provides us with servers - it fell under blocking. We started the change of servers to others, and by the morning it became more or less to improve. Now everything is almost stable.

Due to these problems, we recorded 20 percent subsidence of the traffic. And this, in turn, affects our income and obligations to partners.

I do not see anything surprising in what is happening. We have already encountered this a few years ago, when we blocked one resource - and ours with it. I had to change the site. Therefore, we expected that this time this could be, but we did not expect that everything would be so large and we would fall under the distribution. Amazon is now one of the basic components of the Internet, a huge number of services uses its infrastructure, and abandoning it now is a business damage.

In Roskomnadzor, the practice was worked out, something similar was with [the application-stroke in Russia] Zello. So they are fully aware of what they are doing. The fact that Roskomnadzor touched others is not a mistake on their part. I believe that this is their pressure mechanism not only on Telegram, but also on everyone who is somehow connected with it. Amazon customers suffer, it begins to lose profit. Further a logical step: Amazon himself will come to Telegram and ask to leave. This is the tactics of Roskomnadzor.

Alexander Laryanovsky

Managing partner in the online English school Skyeng

We found our blocking on the evening of April 16. First of all, they tried to understand whether it was possible to solve this problem through a proxy server, but soon realized that it would not withstand this load. Then we informed two and a half thousand students who had a lesson for this evening, that there is a spare option - to go through the lesson through the backup infrastructure. We began to rebuild it on "military" servers and other hosting. Some students crossed, but on spare services, the throughput was too low - and it was not possible to implement our plan entirely.

By morning, we restored access to our site. Part of the team still held a hand on the pulse - so as not to miss another blow from Roskomnadzor, but there were no new “foci of fire”.

During the evening, our loss amounted to about two million rubles. We must reimburse these funds to teachers who could not hold the planned lessons yesterday. Teachers turned out to be hostages of a situation in which they were not at all to blame. We also have indirect losses - these are the emergency efforts of our Skyeng team, funds for the purchase and rental of new server capacities. Well, and, most likely, we will lose some customers because of this incident, some teachers will leave.

I think Roskomnadzor has one logic: the forest is chopped - chips fly. That is, they think: if we touch someone, so what? One service is more, one less. The usual negligence, neglect of the interests of others. The classic story about the fact that for them the main thing is to have time to report to the authorities, that they did everything, and they do not give a damn about the rest. I think that here, as always, the simplest explanation is the most correct.

Vladimir Kobzev

Founder of courier delivery service "Bird"

From six o’clock in the evening until midnight April 16, most of our customers could not go to the Birds website. At first we sinned on ourselves, we thought that we had some kind of technical failure, but when we were able to go to our site through the VPN, we realized that we were blocked. On Amazon, we have a hosting service, and our addresses fell [under the blocking]. Amazon technical support helped us solve the problem simply by changing the IP address. However, at three in the afternoon of April 17, [Roskomnadzor] blocked a new portion of IP addresses, and our site was again among them.

Our couriers mainly worked with Telegram, because it was most convenient. Many of our employees use this messenger so far, simply because there is nothing more convenient. On Sunday evening, one of our clients even offered to pay VPN couriers - for access to Telegram. But while it works without VPN.

Amazon is not an ordinary hosting, but very worthy, but we will move from there - with great regret.

In fact, the “bird” has a small loss - while we had problems, we lost about 80 orders, that is, the couriers lost 30 thousand rubles. But much more I am concerned about the loss of confidence in the resource. If one client leaves us, we will lose ten thousand rubles on it.

[Head of Roskomnadzor Alexander] Zharov operates with the formulations “War”, “We are going to fight”. This is a very strange position for an employee of the state structure, too emotional. Apparently, he has a carte blanche for these actions regarding Telegram. But now it is obvious that Durov also has his trump cards.

Alexey Panfilov

Product manager in the newsletter service for Discounts of NAU

Our service is based on a mobile application. The resource is designed to connect people and stores - retailers that offer profitable discounts. The problems began on April 16 in the evening, when our employees could not go into the admin panel through the MTS provider. They had a window that the address was blocked. After some time, the rest of the operators also blocked our resource.

The application was not available for users for several hours while we rebuilt the server. We have lost funds for the purchase of additional servers for users from Russia, and, of course, all this can cause the outflow of customers in the future. In general, the losses are not cosmic, but unpleasant, especially for us as a startup.

Now we have changed the server IP address, but many operators are still stolen by the old one, and we are waiting for it to be updated.

Irina Kravtsova