Russia blames Google outage on data centre fireSee also: Video game retailer GameStop stock doubles again with no let-up in amateur interest - UPDATES: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets outright, RobinHood bans buying more stock
Russian authorities have blamed problems accessing Google and YouTube on a fire at a data centre in Strasbourg.
The country's media watchdog Roskomnadzor tweeted that the disruption was due to the incident.
The data centre belongs to French cloud service provider OVH, which runs 32 such sites in Europe, America and Asia.
No-one was injured in the fire, which was declared a major incident.
It is not clear how the blaze started.
Two other data centres on the site remain closed.
OVH provides cloud services for 1.6 million customers across 140 countries.
The multiplayer video game Rust was also impacted - its developers tweeted that some players' progression data had been permanently lost.
The Google outages come the same day as Roskomnadzor announced that it had deliberately slowed down the speed of Twitter for failing to remove 3,000 posts relating to suicide, drugs and pornography.
Twitter had failed to remove posts that are illegal in Russia - and pretty much everywhere else, actually:'On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.'
President Vladimir Putin recently gave the watchdog the power to block social media platforms if they discriminated against Russian media.
Twitter is the widely used by opposition figures including Alexei Navalny, who was jailed in January.
Previously the authorities have experimented with ways to create a Russia-specific internet, separate from the rest of the world, something that it says would offer protection if the West cut off internet access - but which critics say would allow it to censor a range of content.
RT in Germany is planning to take legal action against the tabloid Bild, after the Berlin newspaper ran a sensationalist tale that relied on leaked Telegram chats from a former employee, who claimed he had to spy for the channel.More from RT:
In the article published on Tuesday, reporter Julian Roepcke, who has previously been aligned with the 'Disinformation Portal' of NATO's Atlantic Council adjunct, claims that, according to Bild's information, President Vladimir Putin ordered a spy op on his "public enemy number one." It allegedly targeted opposition figure Alexey Navalny and two of his close aides. The supposed snooping is said to have happened during the activist's treatment for alleged Novichok poisoning last year at Berlin's Charité clinic.
On top of that, writes Roepcke, "Russia's leadership used the Russian foreign broadcaster RT DE, which in turn relied on two German employees." To back up the claims, Bild also ran an interview with Daniel Lange, then an employee of RT DE, who claimed he had a feeling of having been used as a spy in the case. Lange also leaked to Bild what he says were internal chats with his bosses.
Calling out Roepcke's article, the head of RT in Germany Dinara Toktosunova said Lange had leaked Telegram chats in which he was merely being asked to do his job, after he'd failed to get any exclusive and newsworthy material about Navalny's stay in Germany.
"We remind our colleagues of the German legislation that (for now) protects the press by allowing it to collect information about matters of public interest," Toktosunova added.
The Bild article comes just days after Commerzbank told the parent company of RT DE and Ruptly that it would be ending their business relationship and closing their accounts at the end of May. Since Commerzbank changed its terms of service last November, RT DE had been trying to find an alternative bank, but 20 other financial institutions have either ignored its enquiries or flatly refused to open accounts on its behalf.
Leonid Volkov, a senior aide of the Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, has delivered an uncouth reaction to a baseless report by Berlin tabloid Bild alleging that RT's German service sent its employees to "spy" on his boss.
On Tuesday, Lithuania-based Volkov took the allegations published by red-top Bild at face value, launching a verbal attack on the head of RT in Germany (RT DE), Dinara Toktosunova, and Ruptly's chief content officer and executive adviser, Ekaterina Mavrenkova.
"It looks like [RT editor-in-chief Margarita] Simonyan's b****es are about to get into serious trouble," he wrote in his Telegram channel. Volkov, who describes himself as the "coordinator" of the "network of Alexey Navalny's regional offices" then enthusiastically suggested that RT was about to lose its journalistic license in Germany.
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