Russia has begun restricting access to the App Store
20 July 14:37
Access to the official website of the American company Apple and its App Store has plummeted in Russia, according to OONI, a service that monitors internet blockages, as reported by "Komersant Ukrainian".
According to its data, the problems began on July 18: the percentage of abnormal and failed connections to the App Store rose to 37.7% and reached 39% the following day. By comparison, since the beginning of the year, this figure had never exceeded 16%. Access to Apple’s website has deteriorated even further: since July 17, the percentage of abnormal connections has remained at 66–68%, whereas earlier this year it did not exceed 10.2%.
According to Russian propaganda media, by July 19, the number of complaints about the App Store’s performance had increased more than 30-fold, according to data from the “Sboy.rf” service. Whereas previously an average of about 12 complaints were recorded per day, on Sunday nearly 400 were received. In the first half of July 20, users filed more than 250 complaints.
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The increase in the number of failed connections may indicate that Russian authorities are restricting access. A similar situation was observed when Telegram and WhatsApp were blocked: their availability in Russia is now down by 90% and 84%, respectively. Furthermore, Apple OONI did not record similar outages in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, or other countries.
On July 14, the Apple website had already stopped loading for some Russian users without a VPN. At that time, IT experts, including Mikhail Klimarev, head of the “Internet Protection Society,” speculated that the authorities might have been testing the blocking of Apple and Google resources. According to DownDetector, HTTPS connections to Apple’s website were disrupted in 99% of cases, and to Google’s in 26%.
In June, Apple removed the Russian state-run messaging app Max from its App Store, as well as services such as VK (“VKontakte,” “Odnoklassniki,” “Zen,” VK Music, Mail, and others), citing the need to comply with sanctions imposed against Russia. Following this, the Kremlin questioned the reliability of the American company as a service provider and threatened to curtail its “cooperation” with Apple.
Earlier this month, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation demanded that Apple eliminate “discrimination” against Russian search engines by July 15 and ensure that domestic software could be installed on iOS devices. In the event of noncompliance, the FAS promised to open a case for violating the law on competition protection and threatened Apple with a fine of up to 4 billion rubles. After July 15, Russian authorities did not report any measures taken against the company.
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