Access Restored to Wikipedia in Russia After Overnight Outage

Russian users reported widespread outages of Wikipedia early Friday before access was restored later in the day, independent monitoring groups said.

Issues with opening the online encyclopedia began shortly after midnight Moscow time. Monitoring services Sboy and Downdetector tracked a spike in outage reports across major cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk.

Users reported that Wikipedia remained accessible when using VPNs.

Network testing data from OONI Explorer, the world’s largest open dataset on internet censorship, reportedly showed access anomaly rates for Wikipedia’s Russian-language version briefly hit 100% early Friday, while hitting 75% for the English-language version.

Access began to be restored and disruption rates dropped significantly by 10 a.m. Moscow time. The tech platform Habr reported that Wikipedia was inaccessible in Russia for eight hours.

Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has not commented on the outage.

Roskomnadzor has fined Wikipedia multiple times over its refusal to delete articles related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russian officials have pushed for a domestic alternative to Wikipedia to combat what they claimed to be its Western bias. Those efforts have failed so far.

Fears that authorities may try to block Wikipedia in Russia have grown amid an ongoing wartime crackdown on dissent.

Wikipedia’s Russian-language version continues operating despite the closure of its operator, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Russian division.