Wikipedia can no longer be accessed in Russia without a VPN
Russian users are reporting widespread problems accessing “Wikipedia” without a VPN. The outages began on the night of August 28, and by morning, monitoring services had recorded hundreds of complaints about the online encyclopedia being unavailable.
According to Downdetector and “Sboy.rf,” dozens of reports of access problems were coming in every five minutes, with the total number exceeding 500. The publication “Kod.ru” reported that Russian users cannot access “Wikipedia” without a VPN.
Mikhail Klimarev, head of the “Internet Protection Society,” citing OONI data, noted that Wikipedia’s availability in Russia had dropped to approximately 50%. At the same time, he emphasized that there is not yet enough data to draw definitive conclusions. According to other measurements, the rate of connection failures to the Russian-language version of Wikipedia reached nearly 100% around 9:00 a.m. Moscow time, while the rate for the English-language version was 75%. Later, the figure for the Russian-language version dropped to 62%.
Klimarev speculated that Wikipedia might have been blocked within the Russian Federation. According to him, the online encyclopedia—whose pages are viewed about 27 billion times worldwide each month—had until recently remained one of the few major internet resources that were not blocked in Russia.
There have been no official statements from Russian authorities regarding the blocking or imposition of restrictions on “Wikipedia” at this time.
Earlier, Apple blocked a workaround for installing sanctioned apps in Russia.
VK has filed a lawsuit against Apple regarding the App Store.
Previously, a case was filed against Apple in Russia for refusing to allow the Max messenger app to be installed on iPhones.
As a reminder, Apple, Google, and GitHub websites have stopped working in Russia.
A number of popular Russian services that have come under state control in recent years have begun to disappear from the Google Play app store. These include social networks, messaging apps, email services, and multimedia platforms.
