Monitoring stats show Russians’ YouTube access abruptly rebounded following Putin’s promise to ‘look into’ throttling reports

Russians’ YouTube access was miraculously restored on Thursday, a day after Vladimir Putin reportedly promised filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov that he would “look into” reports of throttled download speeds on the streaming service. 

The GlobalCheck monitoring platform again shows YouTube to be fully accessible in Russia, though various Telegram media outlets report that many Internet users in Russia are still experiencing poor service. GlobalCheck’s statistics since August 2024 show that YouTube’s availability in Russia was below 80 percent until this week.

Shakhnazarov, who has been Mosfilm’s director general since 1998, met with Putin on Wednesday to discuss the studio’s development efforts. The Kremlin’s official transcript does not mention their conversation about YouTube.

For months, Russian telecommunications companies and state officials have insisted that YouTube playback speed issues are due to failing global cache equipment that Google abandoned when it left Russia. However, Google has said there are no technical problems on its end, and Internet experts have attributed the service disruptions to deliberate government censorship.

Despite the apparent restoration of Russians’ YouTube access after a presidential promise to “get to the bottom” of the throttling reports, Putin’s intervention vows often lead to opposite results. Journalists at Agentstvo Media recalled that greater political repressions followed similar pledges concerning “foreign agents,” Jehovah’s Witnesses, and two controversial criminal cases involving torture in jail.