In St. Petersburg, The Mobile Internet Has Been Turned Off Again

This is not the first time this has happened.

The Russian city of St. Petersburg has once again experienced large-scale problems with mobile internet as well as communications. According to Downdetector, complaints from citizens started coming in around noon and are still ongoing.

Local residents told "Fontanka" that in some parts of the city, including the center, the mobile Internet does not work completely. According to Downdetector, more than one and a half thousand appeals were recorded over the day, and the service estimates the estimated number of affected users at about 70 thousand people. Some users note that even "white-listed" sites and applications are inaccessible, writes The Moscow Times .

This is not the first such outage in St. Petersburg this month. Earlier, the St. Petersburg publication Paper counted at least 9 days in December when users complained about communication problems in the city. On December 17, it became known that the mobile Internet in the northern capital practically did not work during the previous week. The shutdowns began on December 11, after authorities declared an air danger due to a drone attack on the Leningrad region.

The governor of the Leningrad region, Alexander Drozdenko, explained that security agencies, based on the operational situation, block or slow down certain websites and temporarily limit mobile communications "for the sake of security," given the "geopolitical location of the region." He also warned that before the New Year and during the vacations, outages could become more frequent due to "provocations, UAV attacks and attempts to cyber-interfere with infrastructure."

Before that, prolonged outages were recorded in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Buryatia, Belgorod and Rostov regions. In Belgorod Region, Minister of Public Communications Oksana Tarantova asked the heads of local media not to raise the topic of Internet outages in their stories. A screenshot of her message in a closed chat with the heads and owners of publications was published by "Ashes".

"We can't raise the topic in your materials about Internet shutdowns - it threatens us with the fact that our difference from other regions will be noticed and everything will be cut off. That is: raising the topic of Internet restrictions = the risk of being left without it at all," Tarantova wrote. She also asked journalists to "follow the logic given by the GTRK" in covering the topic, as "the line agreed with everyone will be set out there."

The minister's appeal followed Vladimir Putin's "direct line," during which Belgorod GTRK correspondent Anna Rudchenko complained about the consequences of mobile Internet disconnections for the region's residents. According to her, people cannot monitor air danger, study remotely, and diabetic patients are deprived of the opportunity to control their blood glucose levels through mobile applications. Putin responded by saying the restrictions were due to the threat of drone strikes.

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