On the evening of Tuesday, August 18, 2026, users across Russia reported massive outages in online and digital services. After 20:00, the first complaints began to appear in large numbers on the DownDetector portal, with peak malfunction maps covering almost the entire territory of the country.
Residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions faced the fact that websites stopped opening, markets, social networks, instant messaging tools, banking applications and the Steam platform stopped functioning. It turns out that these issues affected Reg.ru, the largest domain registrar.
The company explained that the issues were related to an outage at a large communications center, affecting a number of other resources. The situation was exacerbated by short-term power outages in several areas of Moscow, including the Gagarinsky and Khamovniki districts, which underwent technological conversion of energy supply sources. By 9 p.m., some users began to gradually restore network access.
