google.ru and youtube.ru were switched off in the .RU registry for hours

On the morning of 14 October, google.ru, youtube.ru, gmail.ru, blogspot.ru and several other Google addresses in Russia's national domain disappeared for a few hours. The domains were not blocked by internet providers: they lost their delegation in the .RU registry itself, so the servers that run the .RU zone started telling everyone, everywhere, that the domains did not exist. By early afternoon Moscow time they were back. Neither the registry, Google's registrar RU-CENTER nor Google has said what happened.

What happened, hour by hour

The registry record for google.ru switched to "REGISTERED, NOT DELEGATED, VERIFIED": the domain still belonged to Google and the owner data was confirmed, but the .RU zone no longer pointed to Google's name servers. According to SecurityLab, at about 10:20 Moscow time all five .RU zone servers it queried answered NXDOMAIN, meaning "no such domain". Yandex's public DNS gave the same answer. Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) and Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) still returned addresses for a while, most likely from their cache, and Google's own name servers kept serving the domain normally. The problem sat in the .RU zone, not at Google.

The same status hit youtube.ru, gmail.ru, blogspot.ru, googl.ru and гугл.рф, all registered through RU-CENTER. At about 10:48 google.ru showed as delegated again in the registry, and the other addresses followed between 10:57 and 11:03. Only at 12:22 to 12:24 did the .RU zone servers point to Google's name servers again. Some users kept seeing errors after that, because resolvers had cached the "no such domain" answer.

The simple explanations do not fit. google.ru has been registered since 2004 and, according to SecurityLab and Comss, is paid for until 2027. Google's services themselves never went down: search, YouTube and Gmail kept working on google.com and the other international addresses.

The new rules in the background

Since 1 September 2026, .RU and .РФ domains have been governed by new government rules (resolution No. 1119), which replaced rules previously set by the registry's coordination centre. Under them, a registrar must end a domain's delegation on the demand of an agency that conducts covert investigations, of the national computer incident centre if a site is involved in cyberattacks, or of the media regulator Roskomnadzor if the domain is used for a site with restricted access. None of these demands needs a court order. Whether any of them was used against google.ru has not been reported, and a technical error has not been ruled out either.

Why a registry switch is different from a block

Most website blocking happens at internet providers: they refuse to connect users in one country, and a different DNS resolver or a VPN often gets around it. A change in the registry works one level higher. Every resolver in the world eventually asks the .RU zone where google.ru lives, so once cached answers expire, the domain stops working for everyone, including people outside Russia and people using a VPN. A different resolver only helped while it still had the old answer stored. The only real workaround was a different domain, here google.com.

This is not unique to Russia. In August, a Texas court order made Verisign switch off a domain in the .com zone, and the site vanished worldwide. In July, after US sanctions against a criminal VPN service, Montenegro's .me registry put Telegram's t.me domain on hold for a day. Whoever controls a top-level domain can make any address in it disappear.

Google announced in April 2025 that it was moving search from country domains to google.com, but the redirect from the old addresses only works while they resolve. Some sites still load Google scripts from google.ru: SecurityLab reports that a Russian tech portal lost its built-in Google search during the outage and had to switch it to cse.google.com.