St. Petersburg Has Started Testing The Internet On "white Lists"
- 22.03.2026, 17:31
Only resources approved by the authorities will be opened.
Mobile Internet has stopped working in St. Petersburg, according to Downdetector. The number of complaints began to grow at 14:00 and almost reached 1,400 in an hour and a half. At the same time, authorities did not report any drone attacks on the city.
Residents said that in some areas, including Moskovsky, only government-authorized resources from the "white list" are open, and somewhere they are inaccessible as well. "Nothing works or loads!" - writes one of the users. "From the white should be only nights, sick of disabling the Internet and disrupting business and communication between people," adds another.
The connection in St. Petersburg was previously blocked on March 17 and March 9. Both times, the governor of the Leningrad Region Alexander Drozdenko reported drone dangers and "possible lowering of mobile Internet speeds." On March 22, there were no such warnings from either him or the St. Petersburg authorities. The Russian Defense Ministry also did not mention these regions in its report on Ukrainian drone attacks.
March 13, the "white list" started working in Moscow, which was preceded by a week of large-scale shutdowns. At the moment, the list includes more than 120 resources. Among them are the portal "Gosuslugi", websites of government agencies, services of "Yandex", social networks "VKontakte" and "Odnoklassniki", video hosting Rutube, as well as a number of marketplaces, banks and propaganda media, including Vladimir Putin's favorite newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda".
According to calculations of the project "On Communication", by March 20 "white lists" were implemented in 72 regions of Russia. The country's full transition to an isolated Internet may take place by 2028, RKS Global predicted.
In 2025, Russia became the world leader in terms of the scale of Internet outages, which affected almost the entire population - 146 million people. According to Top10VPN experts' calculations, the Russian economy lost about 1 trillion rubles due to the shutdowns. Since 2026, against the backdrop of increased blocking and worsening financial situation, the country's residents have begun to grow interest in emigration again, according to Google Trends.
According to Reuters, the Russian authorities are focusing on the experience of Iran and China in their campaign to restrict communication and access to network resources. Two sources told the publication that Moscow was studying the experience of China, which lives behind a "great firewall," and Iran, where the Internet is regularly shut down in response to public protests. Russian officials were then instructed to find a way to block vast segments of the network, both mobile and wired, while controlling online communications, the sources said.