Google has denied any involvement in YouTube's problems in Russia

The American company Google stated that the failures in the work of its video hosting service YouTube "are not the result of any technical problems" on its part. Representatives of the company told about this in a conversation with Kommersant journalists.

Russian users began complaining en masse about YouTube outages on August 1: videos began loading slowly or not playing at all. The service "Sboi.rf" registered more than 14 thousand complaints about the stability of the video hosting service in one day. On August 2, complaints continued to arrive.

The largest state-owned telecom operator Rostelecom said the outage was caused by technical problems with equipment owned by Google. This equipment is used to cache and speed up content loading. Due to the inability to update and "expand" the equipment, the announcement said, "there is a serious overload of existing capacities, including at peering junctions." This could affect the download speed and playback quality of YouTube videos for subscribers of all Russian operators, Rostelecom reported.

Shortly before the problems with the video hosting service began, the Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, announced a deliberate slowdown of YouTube in Russia. According to the deputy, the reason for this "degradation" is the violation of the law by the "administration of a foreign resource." The slowdown was supposed to affect only the desktop version of the hosting service so that "the resource itself could see with its own eyes that the state had moved from persuasion to concrete steps."

In response to a request from journalists to recommend a network connection technology that would allow watching YouTube without interruptions, the president's press secretary Dmitry Peskov refused to recommend a VPN. "Everyone should use it themselves. There are many (technologies. - Kholod) ," Peskov said. "It works fine on the phone. Everything loads." Two years ago, the official representative of the Kremlin admitted that he uses a VPN.

In the last week of July, when the first complaints about the loading speed of YouTube videos were already starting to arrive, 82.5 million Russians over the age of four used the video hosting service at least once. This was reported by RBC with reference to the company Mediascope. The average daily reach, according to the study, was 55.7 million users - this is more than in the same week a year ago (52.3 million connections).

The YouTube audience in Russia has been growing for the past two years. According to Mediascope data, 78.5% of the country's residents visited the media hosting service at least once a month in 2024.

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