Huge swathes of Vladimir Putin’s empire were cut off from internet today in a mystery outage.
It came amid Russian complaints Ukraine and the West had targeted its satellites.
There are also suspicions that numerous fires, explosions and accidents at key strategic facilities may be caused by sabotage linked to foes of Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The unprecedented massive web problems hit large regions across Siberia and the Russian Far East, and spanned many of Putin’s 11 zones.
Provider TransTeleCom (TTK) told its subscribers in Yakutia - Russia’s largest region - that it had experienced “failure on a backbone fibre-optic link”.
The company’s helpline stopped working.
Among the regions hit were Perm, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Primorsky, Krasnoyarsk, TransBaikal, Buryatia, Yakutia, Amur, the Jewish Autonomous territory Primorsky and Sakhalin.
The city of St Petersburg also suffered problems, it was claimed.
The named regions hit by the outages and problems were more than 36 times larger than the size of the United Kingdom, and almost the size of the United States.
One report said: “There is a global failure at TTK.
“There is no Internet in half of the Far Eastern Federal District.
“Communication interruptions occurred about two hours ago.”
TTK is closely linked to its main shareholder Russian Railways.
It developed by supplying the web via the Trans-Siberian railway route and branch lines.
Many areas hit today were linked to these routes.
Customers expressed outrage on social media about a lack of information about the internet.
“Nothing works,” said one.
“I’m switching to a different user,” said another.
This week Moscow threatened to disrupt the West’s civilian space satellites in a dramatic escalation of its war in Ukraine.
The Russian foreign ministry accused unnamed countries of assisting Kyiv to target Russia’s satellites.
"This is an outrageous violation of international law,” said the ministry.
“The Russian side has the right to respond appropriately.”
It warned: “All necessary possibilities for this are available."
Ukraine was accused of hacking or disrupting Russian civilian communication satellites with the help of “specialists from a number of foreign states”.
The ministry did not give specific examples.
Russia has already accused the West of using its civilian space infrastructure to support the operations of the Ukrainian troops, including for combat strikes, for example detecting the locations of Vladimir Putin’s army and its movements.
And recent weeks have seen Russian radio and TV broadcasts interrupted with warnings of apparent nuclear alerts.
People are urged to rush to their nearest bomb shelters.
Sirens sound out on radio and TV broadcasts.
In one case last month Russians were warned today to take anti-radiation potassium iodide pills and rush to their nearest nuclear bomb shelters.
In another example two weeks ago residents of annexed Crimea were warned of impending emergency evacuation ferry crossings to the Russian mainland after an intense drone attack by Ukraine on naval port Sevastopol.
The impact is seen as causing psychological trauma among the population and leading to a questioning of Putin’s war against Ukraine.
In such cases Russian officials have blamed the hacking by unknown groups of satellite signals.
Russia is seeking to speed up its military satellite launches amid the war in Ukraine.
