Widespread mobile Internet outages have been hitting Moscow for over a week, causing significant disruptions to daily life and raising fears about how far President Vladimir Putin's government will go to tighten its control over online activity.
Residents and businesses in the city of more than 12 million are facing problems with an array of services including online payments, taxi apps, and navigation tools. Sales of offline items such as pagers and paper maps have increased in the capital, a tech-savvy city where a large portion of Russia's wealth is concentrated.
Since many of the outages began on March 7, the situation has worsened, with even websites listed on the government's "whitelist" -- state-friendly resources that are supposed to be exempt from restrictions -- becoming inaccessible.
The Kremlin has officially attributed these disruptions to increased security measures, but has given few details.
"Kyiv is using increasingly sophisticated methods for attacks, so Russia needs increasingly technological protection measures," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 12 in a reference to Ukrainian retaliation against Russia's full-scale invasion of the neighboring country, now in its fifth year.
SEE ALSO: The Kremlin Really Wants Russians To Switch To A New State-Backed Messenger App. Russians Really Don’t Want To.Government critics say state authorities often cite security concerns when they want to tighten restraints on the lives and freedoms of citizens.
"Russia's leadership is simply very cowardly. So cowardly that it does not care about civil liberties, the economy, or people's convenience. It absolutely does not care about any of that," said Mikhail Klimarev, an activist and director of the Internet Protection Society.
Outages have hit other parts of Russia for months, but the shutdowns in the capital have drawn more attention.
"Mobile Internet has been shut down in Russia since June 2025. And only now has all this reached Moscow," Klimarev told Current Time.
SEE ALSO: Russian Regulators Restrict WhatsApp, Telegram In Latest Internet CrackdownMobile Internet has been unavailable almost everywhere in Moscow, both in central districts and surrounding areas, residents said.
"I am a freelancer and I need good Internet. I had to give my client a discount because I couldn't meet the deadline," Alina, a Moscow resident, told RFE/RL Siberia.Realities.
Putin's government has been struggling for years to manage and restrict Russians' use the Internet. Authorities have targeting Western giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon while also fostering homegrown alternatives they can control more easily.
Activists and others suspect the shutdown of mobile Internet in Moscow is being used to test the "whitelist" system of approved websites.
The "whitelist" of resources available during Internet shutdowns began testing last summer. The list includes the websites of mobile operators, pro-Kremlin media outlets, government agencies, marketplaces, and social media companies such as Odnoklassniki, and VK, formerly known as VKontakte.
SEE ALSO: Max Cometh: What The Blocking Of WhatsApp, Telegram Means For Millions Of RussiansTelegram, the most widely used messaging app in Russia, has also been experiencing access problems, as has WhatsApp.
"Telegram's accessibility has dropped by 80 percent" since the previous day, Klimarev wrote on March 16.
Russia last year launched it own state-backed messaging app, Max, is facing backlash from critics who view it as a state surveillance tool. State media has dismissed these concerns, maintaining the app is a secure and independent tool.
On February 20, Putin signed a law requiring telecommunications operators to suspend services at the request of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. At the same time, the authorities exempted operators from liability to their clients if the service interruption was caused by compliance with the intelligence agency's demands.
The Russian government has long censored online content to limit opposition, monitored Internet traffic in the name of security, and tightened control over media. A government clampdown on the freedom of speech, assembly, and other liberties has gathered force since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 and tightened still further since he start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.