Fire and blackouts near a Moscow telecom hub knock Discord, Steam, and Telegram offline across Russia

Users across Russia — mostly in Moscow and St. Petersburg — reported a major outage affecting a range of services and websites.

Downdetector data showed problems with the internet providers Lovit and Rostelecom, the mobile operators MegaFon and Beeline, and Discord, Steam, Telegram, and other websites and services.

The domain registrar Reg.ru told the Russian state news agency TASS that power disruptions at a major communications hub caused the outage across the Runet, the Russian segment of the internet.

Power also went out in several Moscow districts. In the southwest, shoppers were evacuated from the Gagarinsky mall, the Moscow news outlet Msk1 said. Witnesses told the Telegram channel Ostorozhno, Moskva that a fire had broken out at a facility on Vavilova Street. A siren was sounding at the scene, and several fire crews and ambulances had arrived, the channel said. The Telegram channel 112 also reported that an explosion struck a power substation near Vavilova Street.

Residents of the Khamovniki, Zamoskvorechye and Danilovsky districts reported outages as well.

According to the Telegram channel ZaTelekom, the outage stemmed from a power failure at the MMTS-9 telecommunications hub, also known as M9, at 7 Butlerova Street. “This is a historic site and one of the key locations for housing equipment,” the channel said. Butlerova Street lies in southwestern Moscow, in the same part of the city as the Gagarinsky district.

SecurityLab, a Russian information security outlet, said hosting providers “have started openly saying their server racks at M9 are isolated,” and that the site “houses the country’s key network infrastructure and the core of the MSK-IX internet exchange point.”

A source cited by the Russian business news outlet RBC also linked the Runet outage to the incident in Moscow’s Gagarinsky district, where MMTS-9 is located.