Roskomnadzor Has Moved To Completely Block YouTube In Russia
- 10.02.2026, 21:12
Before that, the video hosting service had been "slowed down" for a year and a half.
After a year and a half of fighting YouTube through a slowdown, Roskomnadzor has started blocking the video hosting site in Russia by removing its domain from the list of controlled DNS servers, IT experts said. "Now, when you try to go to YouTube, the router simply can't associate the site's address with its IP and you get an error. As a result, the service will be completely inaccessible without a VPN," explains "Exploit".
The National Domain Name System (NDNS), which was created for the "sovereign Runet," is used for blocking, according to the On the Links project. All telecom operators are required to use it from 2021, allowing the regulator to centrally manage access to websites. "In fact, the DNS servers controlled by Roskomnadzor stopped returning correct addresses for the youtube.com domain, which led to the impossibility of connecting users," Jemali Avalishvili, managing director of infrastructure integrator Ultimatek, confirmed to RBC.
Independent telecom market expert Alexei Uchakin drew attention to the fact that the blocking of YouTube coincided with the strengthening of restrictions against Telegram. According to him, it is most likely that the case is that the capacity of technical means of countering threats (TTPU), which are put on the networks of providers to filter traffic, is not enough to slow down two major resources at once. "This is a saving of resources... We get a crude but quite reliable 'off switch' of YouTube on the territory of Russia," the expert noted. Earlier Discord and Signal were blocked in the same way.
The head of administration and DevOPS MD Audit (part of Softline) Alexander Demin agreed that Roskomnadzor applied one of the simplest ways of blocking, but, according to the expert, it "can be easily bypassed by changing DNS or tunneling traffic".
Demin noted that the entire YouTube infrastructure, including data centers and CDN (Content Delivery Network), continues to function, so the service works through alternative DNS or VPNs, where requests are processed outside the controlled area.
Russians first encountered YouTube slowdown in late July 2024. At first, Roskomnadzor attributed it to "technical problems" on the side of the video hosting owner - the American corporation Google, which had not updated its servers in Russia for a long time. However, the regulator eventually admitted that it had itself restricted YouTube's work, citing "violations of the law" and "disrespect" for the country. In particular, the agency accused the video hosting of blocking more than 200 Russian propaganda channels.
Despite the slowdown, which since December 2024 has effectively made it impossible to watch YouTube videos from Russia, the platform remains popular with the country's residents. According to Mediascope, 65.9 million Russians visited the American service in January 2026. It was in second place after VK Video, which had an audience of 82.8 million people. YouTube was used daily by 22 million Russians.