They estimated that the total economic loss of Moscow businesses could reach three to five billion rubles (32 to 53.5 million euros) during the first five days of outages alone, while the loss of income was mainly felt by small entrepreneurs and medium-sized companies. For example, courier companies or taxi companies.
White lists
Muscovites began to register problems with the Internet around March 6. As reported by the Russian media, at the beginning of the outages, mainly websites that were on the so-called white list worked on smartphones. This is a list of “vetted” websites, which was prepared by the Russian Ministry of Digital Development last year – these websites should be available to Russian residents even during mobile internet outages.
According to them, these are, for example, the websites of state institutions, the websites of some Russian media, the Yandex search service, Russian railways, banks, mobile operators, delivery services, Russian social networks such as VKontakte or the Russian communication platform Max.
However, on March 12, according to the website, residents of Moscow began to encounter a problem – the mobile Internet did not even allow them to access these sites, regardless of whether they used an encrypted VPN connection or not.
“Muscovites have a way to find out if their mobile signal is not working without taking their phone out of their pocket: using streaming services such as Apple Music or Yandex.Music. If the songs in these applications are not downloaded to the smartphone, the playlist will stop playing in the headphones as soon as the user enters the area without a signal,” writes Bereg in his report.
Fear of “cobwebs”
Although today attention is mainly focused on internet outages in Moscow, various Russian regions already experienced internet shutdowns in 2025. The Russian authorities have started shutting down the Internet with the justification that it is to protect against Ukrainian drones.
According to the website, which cites the project Na svyazi (On the reception, ed.), similar restrictions began to be implemented en masse in May, and the frequency of outages peaked in the summer, when internet outages occurred on an almost daily basis, with internet filtering affecting more than half of Russia’s population – approximately 90 million people.
By mid-October, the above-mentioned white lists appeared, which began to apply in 48 regions.
Sarkis Darbinyan, a lawyer and co-founder of the Russian NGO Roskomsvoboda, which fights against internet censorship, told the website that last year’s outages were likely due to a “wild fear of a repeat of Operation Cobweb”.
In this case, it was an operation by the Security Service of Ukraine, which managed to smuggle remotely controlled drones into Russian territory, and then using them
The Kremlin is pushing its own app
However, according to Nova Gazeta, the current outages may be related to the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent Russians from accessing content that the Kremlin would like to censor. This is also why the authorities should have focused on popular communication platforms such as WhatsApp or Telegram.
They are to be replaced by the Russian application Max, with which the presence of spy software. According to Nova Gazeta, the app can, for example, identify whether the device is connected to a VPN network and thus detect attempts to circumvent Internet censorship.
But it turned out that the Russians are not as enthusiastic about the application as the Kremlin would like. A poll last year revealed that nearly 70 percent of Russians do not use the state-backed tool. Some even avoid it outright.
As the website described last year, one of the residents of St. Petersburg preferred to quit her job so she wouldn’t have to install it.
The woman told reporters that when she expressed her doubts about the app’s security at work, she “got a lecture about how all social media is under surveillance.” “The Americans monitor WhatsApp, the French monitor Telegram, but only the FSB monitors Max,” she quoted her Russian boss, for whom the app became “the last straw” at work.
