Several Russian government websites, including the official Kremlin site, were intermittently unavailable to users in Russia and other parts of the world on Thursday.
The websites went down just hours after Russian troops invaded Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the start of a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The government’s website (government.ru), the State Duma’s website (Russia’s lower house of parliament), and the Ministry of Defense’s website were all affected.
At the time of writing, the English-language version of the Kremlin’s website (en.kremlin.ru) was not loading.
It was unclear what had caused the issue.
When asked if the Kremlin’s website had been subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a Kremlin spokesperson insisted that the platform was functioning smoothly.
Doug Madory, an analyst at the internet monitoring firm Kentik, told CNN that the outages are part of a larger pattern of DDoS attacks aimed at Russia’s government.
“It is a simultaneous flood of traffic from sources around the world on a specific port … to…
