Kremlin IT Pros Fail To Launch Putin's Election Website

• 29.12.2023, 14:37

Error or sabotage?

Kremlin IT specialists failed to launch the website for the election campaign of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who announced his nomination for a fifth term earlier in December.

The state news agency RIA Novosti announced the launch of the site.

“The website of the candidate for the post of Russian President Vladimir Putin has started working,” said the agency’s message published on its Telegram channel.

However, it turned out to be impossible to access the website specified by RIA: browsers generated the error “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN”.

In the case with Putin’s website, the DNS — the “domain name system”— a computer distributed system for obtaining information about domains is configured incorrectly, a network infrastructure specialist explained to The Moscow Times: “One of the standard, commonly accepted on the Internet site names through which access usually occurs is not specified.”

It took the Kremlin IT specialists about 20 minutes to correct the error: after this time, the website started working.