RUSSIA FILES LAWSUIT AFTER CLAIMS THAT FIRE IN FRANCE BROKE GOOGLE AND YOUTUBE

On the same day Russia made a pig’s ear of its attempt to censor Twitter, dozens of other websites – including Google and YouTube – went down.

A data centre belonging to French cloud provider, OVH, caught on fire. During the time of the fire, Russia experienced widespread outages, with people unable to get onto Google and YouTube. Russia is now trying to blame the damage on a fire in another country, however Google denies the fact.

The state media watchdog, Roskomnadzorm, stated on Wednesday that the problems regarding access to Google and YouTube were caused by the fire in France.

A Google spokesperson stated, "Following extensive investigation, we have no evidence to indicate that the fire in OVHCloud's data centre, or Google's own infrastructure, was the root cause of this incident," and added that the outage lasted a little over two hours.

"We believe the cause of this incident was a misconfiguration of the routers at a local third-party internet service provider.”

The Google outages happened on the same day that Russia tried to slow internet traffic to Twitter, claiming that the site failed to take down illegal content. However, Russia accidentally blocked a bunch of unrelated sites, including the Kremlin's own website.

Roskomnadzor added that the Google outage was "not connected to the agency's actions on restriction of speed of access to the Twitter social platform".

Russia also went as far as to sue Twitter, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and encrypted messaging app, Telegram. They say these digital companies failed to delete content relating to protests over the jailing of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's political opponent.