Complaints about access to the online encyclopedia began arriving late Thursday night, according to data from the monitoring services Sboi.rf, Downdetector and Detector404. Most reports came from Moscow and St. Petersburg.
According to the monitoring project OONI Explorer, the share of anomalies in access to the Russian-language version of Wikipedia reached 100% in the morning, and 75% for the English-language version. Service availability improved later. DownDetector also recorded network failures at the 100% level.
Mikhail Klimarev, head of the Internet Protection Society, said Wikipedia is blocked across the entire territory of Russia. "This has been a long time coming, and it's strange that they hadn't blocked it before," he noted.
Russian authorities have repeatedly demanded that Wikipedia's owners remove information about the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) ordered search engines to label the encyclopedia as a violator of Russian laws because of articles about the war.
In 2023, Valery Fadeev, head of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, called for Wikipedia to be shut down, citing "many distortions" in political and historical articles. The idea was supported in the Kremlin, though presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov clarified that a Russian version of the resource should first be created.