The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suspended the accreditation of the athletes' doping-control laboratory in the Kazakh city of Almaty for four months.
WADA said in a statement on June 28 the suspension prohibits the laboratory from carrying out any anti-doping activities including all analyses of urine and blood samples.
It said the decision to suspend the Almaty laboratory was "a direct result of the more stringent quality assessment procedures enacted by WADA."
The Almaty laboratory has three weeks to appeal the WADA decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
WADA shut down work at the Olympic drug test laboratory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last week, in a move that plunged Olympic drug testing into uncertainty.
It has also suspended labs in Russia, China, Spain, South Africa, and Portugal in recent months.
Last week, Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov reportedly ordered officials to find private sponsors to finance an upgrade of the Almaty laboratory.
That move came just days after four Kazakh gold medalists in weightlifting from the 2012 Olympics were announced to have failed retests of their samples.
The athletes stand to lose their medals.
