In Sevastopol, Russian social networks and services banned by Ukraine were accidentally blocked

On the morning of May 31, the Russian provider Telesystems (a daughter of the Ukrainian provider Volya) blocked access to Yandex, Mail.ru, Vkontakte and many other Russian sites that fell under the economic sanctions of the Ukrainian authorities in Crimea. This writes the Sevastopol news portal ForPost. Locals say that the blocking occurred not only at this provider, but about two thirds of subscribers of various providers of Crimea.

The reason is that the Telesystem provider purchased traffic from the Ukrainian company Volia, which is why this technical incident occurred. The situation was corrected within a few hours by setting up the routing tables.

When subscribers of the Telesystem provider tried to access one of the sites that were blocked, a message appeared in the Ukrainian language: “Dear subscriber! Access to this resource is blocked according to the Decree of the President of Ukraine No. 133/2017. On the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine of April 28, 2017 “On the application of personal special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions)”. Company WILL ".
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As you know, Poroshenko's decree on the extension of anti-Russian sanctions came into force on May 17. 1228 people and 468 firms and companies got into the expanded version of the sanctions list.

The situation with the blocking of Crimeans explained in the comments for TASS and. about. Head of the Main Directorate for Informatization and Communication of Sevastopol Vladimir Georgiou. He said that the blocking occurred as a result of providing traffic to subscribers purchased in Ukraine: “Part of the traffic went through Ukrainian providers, so blocking occurred, but the issue was resolved within two to three hours, the routing was rewritten. At the provider, part of the traffic went through Russia, part - through Ukraine, those subscribers who received Ukrainian traffic, and encountered blocking. Apparently, the first route was busy, so the users were redirected along the second route and received these alerts, and now they forcefully registered that the traffic did not follow this route, ”said Georgiou.

The expert explained that this is a purely technical problem that residents of any country may face if traffic goes through a neighboring country where a resource is blocked.

Vladimir Georgiu also explained that the Telesystem provider purchased traffic from its parent company Volia, and this is not a violation. And the message about blocking came precisely from the territory of Ukraine from the parent company, which acted in accordance with the laws of their country. There is no violation here either. The logos of the Telesystems and Volia companies are completely identical, so many subscribers might think that the message came from their provider, and in fact it came from Ukraine. So there are no violations, this is a purely technical failure.