Russia: Mass YouTube outage reported amid escalating official criticism

Russian internet monitoring services reported a mass outage on the availability of video hosting site YouTube on Thursday as Russian authorities step up criticism of the platform.

Russian internet monitoring service Sboi.rf said there had been thousands of glitches reported about YouTube in Russia. Users said they could only access YouTube via virtual private networks (VPNs).

“YouTube is not working,” one anonymous user said in comments on the site.